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IN THE 



SPIRIT 



Robert Elsmere 






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I^e. 7 Seapl St.. I^^w Y@pk, 

(Chesebrpugh Building, near Battery Park,) 

DOING 
Al, NEAT AND CORRECT 

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AT MODERATE PRICES, 

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of those being in sympathy with this Publication. 



NATURE 



THE 

AGNOSTIC'S MAGAZINE 



FIRST ISSUE. 



CONTENTS: 

A PROTEST. By Mich. De Gavarelle. 

CONSTITUTION of the Society for 
Propagating Natural Truth. (P. V. N.) 



PUBLISHED BY ORDER OF THE 

SOCIETY FOR PROPAGATING NATURAL TRUTH. 

PRICE 50 CENTS. 

Part of the proceeds goes to the P. V. N. towards 
defraying her administrative expenses. This 
price will be maintained for the six 
first issues, and then will be rela- 
tively reduced, as the number 
of subscribers increases. 

NEW YOKK 

POLYTEOHNICAL HEWS COMPANY 

7 Pearl Street, near Battery Park, 




When of the tree, that Nature made, 
Tie Cross was cut —the make of man- 
To ouit all life, the tree he haUe. 
From death relieve the tree, who can? 

It is eternal Nature's action, 
From which may come its resurrection. 



A PROTEST 



DIRECTED TO 



James Cardinal Gibbons 

J^RCpiSHOP OF BALTIMORE, 



AS THE HEAD OF THE ROMAN CATHOLIC HIERARCHY 

IN THE UNITED STATES OF NORTH AMERICA. 

AND AS THE AUTHOR OF THE RECENTLY PUBLISHED BOOK 

OUR CHRISTIAN HERITAGE 

ifcRARy 



SEVEN LETTERS 

written iu the spirit of 

ROBERT ELSMERE 




BY 



MICH. DB GAVARELLE, P. V. N. _. 

. 

PUBLISHED BY ORDER OF THE 

SOCIETY FOR PROPAGATING NATURAL TRUTH. 

NEW YORK 

POLYTECHNICAL NEWS COMPANY 

7 Pearl Street, near Battery Park, 






The Library 
of Congress 



WASHINGTON 






Entered according to Act of Congress in the year 1889, by 

Mich. De Gavarelle, in the Office of the Librarian 

of Congress, at Washington, D. C, nnder 

No. 36,069 U., on November 27th. 



DEDICATED 

to all those 

who consider their intellect 

as their best possession 

and 

Freedom of Conscience 



as conditional to their 



ENJOYMENT OF LIFE. 



2 — 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 

DEDICATION. Page 1. 

PREFACE. Page 3. 

FIRST LETTER.— To whom Cardinal 
Gibbons directed His Book, "Our Christian 
Heritage," and to whom not. Page 5. 

SECOND LETTER.— What may be Known 

and Proven and what not. Page 28. 

THIRD LETTER. —On Miracles. Page 50. 

FOURTH LETTER.— The Real Position 
of the Roman Catholic Church Towards 
Agnosticism in Contrast with ; Cardinal 
Gibbons' Attempt to Prove the Super- 
natural. Page 56. 

FIFTH LETTER.— Different Methods of 
Propagating the Roman Catholic Faith 
under Different Circumstances. Page 59. 

SIXTH LETTER.— The Roman Catholic 
Church is a Serious Danger in Itself to 
the Institutions of the United States of 
North America. Page 69. 

SEVENTH LETTER.— What Creed the 
American Citizen Should Select. Page 83, 



PREFACE 

The any of Agnostics is crossing tie Rnbicon towards Rome. 
They are organizing for practical rooses. Who will stand oy 
the lag? And wlonot? The Leader. 



ITALICS indicate quotations from "Our 
Christian Heritage" by Cardinal- Arch- 
bishop Gibbons, unless specific statement to 
the contrary be made. 

EOMAN (long primer,) indicates the address of 
the First Congress of Roman Catholic Laymen in 
the United States of North America. 

EOMAN (long primer leaded) indicates quota- 
tion from a popular book on the human body in 
sickness (Pathology) not as yet published. 

ROMAN (small pica leaded) indicates the 
author's own expressions. 



FIRST LETTER. 

To whom Cardinal Gibbons directed His 

book, "Our Christian Heritage," 

and to whom not. 

Your Eminence 

Has directed to the North American public 
in celebration of the one hundredth anniversary 
of the creation of the North American Roman 
Catholic Hierarchy an Address for the evident 
purpose of gathering to the fold of the Roman 
Catholic Church a part of the North American 
people, which your Eminence described as 
follows : 

"The great majority of readers in this 
bustling age, professing to have no leisure, 
and certainly evincing no inclination to peruse 
bulky volumes, no matter how superior their 
merit may be" 

The predecessors of your Eminence in the 
Hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church have 
shown great assiduity at all times since the 
foundation of the Roman Church, and where- 
ever the members of its Hierarchy had not 
succeeded in combining in themselves the 
much coveted temporal power or political 
sovereignty with the spiritual power claimed 



— 6 — 

by them, — in persuading the political rulers of 
the exclusive rights, which the Roman Catholic 
Church claimed to hold on humanity in gen- 
eral and on the sovereigns in special. As long 
and wherever absolutism held the political 
power, the Roman Catholic Church used such 
power as an instrument for its purposes, and 
the church diduse controversy and persuasion 
only as a palliation to the use of power, or 
when the power of absolutism failed to uphold 
the rule of the church. 

Your Eminence is following the practice, as 
it is hereabove truly stated, in addressing the 
sovereign people, the ruler of the United States 
of America, the people itself, thus yielding to 
political necessity in this case, as the Roman 
Catholic Church has always made it a practice 
to do, celebrating high mass and chanting 
u Te Deum laudamus" with the same fervor to 
Louis XVI., to the Republic, to Napoleon I., 
to Charles X., to Louis Philip, Napoleon III., 
to President Thiers and to his successors. 

Every citizen, whom your Eminence will thus 
gather to the folds of the Roman Catholic 
Church, will represent an increase of power for 
the church itself and for its Hierarchy in the 
United States. And be it admitted, that, if the 
expansion of the Roman Catholic Church in 
the United States will continue at the same 



rate, as it has during the past century, the 
majority of the sovereign people of the United 
States of North America will be found, 
wielding its political power under Roman rule, 
disfranchising the minority in the same way 
and manner, as the Jews were disfranchised 
during all of the so-called Christian aera, as 
the Moors and Indians were disfranchised 
under Spanish rule, as the Protestants were 
disfranchised, until with sword in hand they 
obtained their liberty of conscience, or until 
they fled from the home of their ancestors to 
the then inhospitable shores of this continent. 
The sovereign people on this continent in re- 
sisting aggression on the part of the Roman 
Catholic Church and Hierarchy is not as 
favorably situated, as other sovereigns were or 
are in their defence against such aggression. 
The Catholic dukes and kings of Catholic 
Bavaria have claimed and do now claim the 
hereditary prerogative of granting or with- 
holding their 'placet within their realm not 
only as to the personality of the Hierarchy 
but also on the public teaching or non-teach- 
ing of newly created dogmas of the church; 
and at the present moment the present king 
of Bavaria refuses, supported therein by the 
highest officials of his kingdom, to abandon 
his prerogative to refuse his placet to the 



— 8 — 

official promulgation within his kingdom of 
the newly created dogma of the infallibility of 
the Roman Pontifex when speaking ex 
cathedra. 

Thus the political power being represented 
by a hereditary individuality possesses a rep- 
resentative voice, by which a protest may 
be expressed against the assumption of un- 
due influences on civil, temporal, political 
matters by the Roman church, but the North 
American people possesses no such authorized 
representative voice, and on the very day, 
that your Eminence's desire will be fulfilled 
in this bustling age, and all those who pro- 
fess to have no leisure for study, will have 
entered the folds of the church, the church's 
political power will be supreme and the Roman 
Pontifex may ex cathedra hurl an anathema, as 
he has done so often heretofore, against the 
liberty of human conscience to believe or not 
to believe, to search for facts and truth and 
not to submit to the authority of ortho- 
dox teachings. And such freedom of con- 
science will practically exist no longer on this 
continent, and the civil authority of the 
United States will be the executioner of the 
dictates from Rome, the same as Francon and 
Spanish sovereigns have been. 

From the standpoint of your Eminence this 



— 9 — 

would be a boon to the American people, but 
from the standpoint of the reverently un- 
dersigned its prevention would be worth the 
repetition of all the sorrow and suffering of the 
martyrs of science and of libert}^ of conscience, 
whom the Roman Church has persecuted, and 
be worth all the blood, which the martyrs 
for Christianity have shed in resisting to the 
atrocious demands of tyranny then covered 
with the robe of paganism, as your Eminence 
now wears the robe colored after the blood 
of these martyrs of their own liberty of con- 
science. 

And this conviction of a high value of the 
liberty of conscience, doubt and research is 
shared in by many, and in special by the Pro- 
testant denominations still retaining faith in 
at least the divine mission of Jesus Christ, 
notwithstanding your Eminence's eminently 
prudent captatio benevolentiae in calling to 
your Eminence's side, while the battle lasts, 
able and zealous advocates in Protestant 
writers, in not despising or rejecting their 
support— in gladly holding out to them the 
right hand of fellowship, so long as they 

SIDE WITH YOUR EMINENCE IN STRIKING THE 

common foe, declaring it as pleasant to be 

ABLE TO STAND SOMETIMES ON THE SAME PLAT- 
FORM WITH THE CHURCH'S OLD ANTAGONISTS. 



— 10 - 

The battle once won, the Roman Church's 
ingratitude must by necessity become the ad- 
miration of contemporaneous humanity, and 
the "so long as" the present outlay for formal 
fair play will then be to the Roman Church the 
fullest justification in the judgment of the thus 
entangled humanity. 

Th^ Common Foe. 

u The great majority of readers in this 
bustling age profess to have no leisure, and 
certainly evince no inclination to peruse bulky 
volumes, no matter how superior their merit 
may be." 

It is chiefly to this busy restless class that 
the writer addresses himself and he craves 
their earnest attention. — {p. V.). 

Thus your Eminence specifically stated, to 
whom your address on our christian heritage 
is directed, and when your Eminence speaks 
of the common foe, it should in correct conclu- 
sion be understood that this busy restless class, 
this large majority of the American people, 
be indeed the common foe, whom your Emi- 
nence proposes to battle with. And this con- 
clusion claims so much more strength of logic, 
as immediately after speaking of the common 
foe, yonr Eminence declares (p. 2) 

Nor loere these pages written in the fond 



— 11 — 

hope of influencing professional free think- 
ers, agnostics and other avowed enemies of 
Christianity, who will not learn, lest their 
knowledge might compel them to do well, who 
trade in blasphemy, who glory in their nfi- 
delity, and who earn for themselves a cheap 
reputation by coarsely caricaturing every 
doctrine and tradition, that Christians hold 
dear. Every scoffer at religion is the Ther- 
sites of the Christian camp. Such characters 
are found in every age; and they were aptly 
described over eighteen centuries ago by the 
Apostle as " ungodly men denying the only 
Sovereign Ruler, and our Lord Jesus Christ, 
blaspheming tohatever things they know not; 
and what things soever they naturally know, 
like dumb beasts, in these they are corrupted; 
feasting together without fear, clouds with- 
out water, lohich are carried about by the 
winds, autumnal leaves without fruit, raging 
waves of the sea, foaming out their own con- 
fusion, wandering stars, to whom the storm 
of darkness is reserved forever ;" 

These men profess to have discovered in the 
revealed Scriptures, contradictions and ab- 
surdities and legislative enactments un- 
toorthy of the ivisdom and justice of the Di- 
vine Lawgiver. They judge everything from 
their own narrow standpoint without regara 



— 12 — 

to the circumstances of time and place in 
which the Scriptures were written. They will 
ofer more object ions to Christianity in an 
hour than could be reasonably answered in 
a month. While avoiding their ignorance 
of many of the physical laws, that govern the 
universe and that regulate even their own 
bodies, which they see and feel, they will in- 
sist on knowing* everything regarding the in- 
comprehensible Deity and his attributes, In 
a word, they will admit mysteries in the 
material world that surrounds them; but 
mysteries in the supernatural world, they 
will not accept. They will deny any revealed 
truth, that does not fall within the range of 
human experience and that is not in accord- 
ance with the discovered laws of nature. But 
to reject a dogma on such grounds cannot be 
approved by philosophy or sound, sense. 

But the undersigned assuming it to be im- 
possible, that your Eminence really intended 
to call the majority of the American people, 
the common foe of the Eoman Catholic and 
Protestant clergy, but unable to find any 
other foe explained or described in your Em- 
inence'? book, may also assume, that in your 
Eminence's mind the foe takes shape in the 
busy, restless class, the same being considered 
as largely influenced and ccntroled by pro- 



— 13 — 

fessiots t al free-thinkers and agnostics, and 
that your Eminence intends not todeai with 
the leaders, but to direct your Eminence's at- 
tention exclusively to the masses following 
them. 

And in this assumption the writer is up- 
held by the following statement (on page 4) 
in your Eminence's address. 

This little volume is affectionately ad- 
dressed to a large, and I fear, an increasing 
class of persons, who through association, 
the absence of Christian training, a distorted 
education and pernicious reading have not 
only become estranged from the specific teach- 
ings of the Gospel, but whose moral and re- 
ligious nature has received such a shock, that 
they have only a vague and undefined faith 
even in the truths of natural religion under- 
lying Christianity. 

These deserve more pity than blame, they 
have never shared in the Christian heritage 
of their fathers, or they were robbed of it, 
before they had the moral and intellectual 
vigor to resist the invader, or they quietly sur- 
rendered their inheritance before they could 
appreciate its inestimable value. They do 
not boast of their spiritual darkness and 
moral obliquity. They make no parade of 
their irreligion. They feel unhappy in their 
deprivation. 

Some of them not questioning our sin- 



— 14 — 

cerity, nor quite denying the objective truth 
of our Christian profession, contemplate 
us with secret envy. But as they fancy, 
that the atmosphere of faith would be op- 
pressive to them, because it involves sacrifices 
hard to flesh and blood, they make no efforts 
to acquire it. Their disease is partly mental 
doubt but still more moral cowardice. 

Others of them honestly imagine that, in 
accepting and prof es sing the truths of Chris- 
tianity, we are in a state of happy delusion, 
and they pity us. 

There are others, I think, w7w as honestly 
persuade themselves, that we do not believe 
what we preach; and they very naturally de- 
spise us. 

The men, of whom I speak, have but a dim 
and hazy vieio of the first principles of re- 
ligion. 

To lead, them back to the Christian fold by 
starting with an appeal to the divine claims 
of Christ, to the value of the soul, the voice of 
conscience, the importance of salvation, 
the glory of heaven or the sufferings of the 
reprobate, is to assume as granted facts, which 
they do not accept. It is like commencing the 
house at the roof instead of at the founda- 
tion. As grace is founded on nature, so the 
knowledge of supernatural religion must rest 
on natural religion. We waste our lime in 
trying to build up the edifice of faith in men 



- 15 - 

in whose souls the foundations of natural 
truth have been undermined. 

What is to be gained in exhorting men to 
worship the Trinity, until the misgivings they 
have about the existence of a personal God are 
removed? 

What loill it profit us to admonish them to 
submit to the inscrutable decrees of Provi- 
dence, if they do not admit a superintending 
Providence, but look upon all events, that 
happen, as the result of physical laws or of 
blind chance? 

There is little to be gained in quoting Scrip- 
ture to men who imagine, that many facts of 
Scripture are controverted by the deductions 
of science. 

In vain do toe strive to persuade men to be 
solicitous about the salvation of their souls, so 
long as they are seduced into the belief, that 
they have no soul or spiritual being, and 
maintain, that their mental conceptions are 
mere modifications of the brain. 

Before we can persuade them to listen with 
docility to the voice of conscience, we must 
first convince them, that conscience is the 
voice of God, and not, as they imagine, the 
prompting of a timid nature, or the outcome 
of education. 

Before we can succeed in urging men to 
keep the Commandments, the distinction be- 
tween virtue and vice, xohich is icell-nigh ob- 



_ 10 _ 

fcferata* /row, their hearts, must be made 
clearly manifest. 

And we are preaching to deaf ears in re- 
buking sin and in exhorting men to resist 
their evil, inclinations, till we get them to ad- 
mit, that man enjoys moral freedom, and dis- 
abuse them of the false notion, that sensual 
desires were given us to be gratified, and that 
it is neither expedient nor possible to resist 
what a contemporary writer calls "the divine 
rights of passion." 1 

In a word, it is time thrown away to ex- 
pat late on the happiness of eternal life before 
hearers, who do not believe in immortality, but 
who regard death as the term of man's 'exist- 
ence. 

The class of men of whom I am writing 
will bluntly say to us : We are longing for 
light, but we hesitate to become Christians, 
not so much because your religion claims to 
be supernatural,as because we suspect it to be 
irrational. We reject your authority as 
teachers; we reject Christian revelation; we 
take nothing for granted; we appeal to the 
court of reason and historical evidence. Let 
us try to meet them on their own ground, and 
accept the appeal. 

Your Eminenc 's hereabove quoted de- 
scription of the masses standing outside of all 

l Hobert Mwnere. 



— 17 — 

orthodox christian creeds could not well be ex 
pected to be other than just such as it is,name- 
ly: one written under the assumption, that 
all, what is inside of the Roman Catholic 
Church, be good, and all, what be outside of it, 
be bad. 

If in such a description the words Buddhism 
be substituted for Christianity, and Buddh- 
ist, for Christian, and some allusions to spe- 
cific christian dogmas by allusions to Buddh- 
ist dogmas, it would read just as well in de- 
fense of Buddhism as it does of Christianity. 
Nevertheless many of its assertions have the 
value only of assumptions in both cases. It 
is indeed one of the tenacious illusions with 
the adherents to orthodox creeds, that all 
those standing outside do not feel happy. 
This is indeed not so. Under equal disposi- 
tions and surroundings agnostics are much 
more at ease (happy) in their true inward 
mind than all those as yet waging battle with 
their doubts in their own mind, and these bat- 
tles will occur in the most stubborn cf chris- 
tian believers, as the confessions of many indi- 
cate. 

Leaving out the controversy with heretics 
(Protestants, etc.) for the present (until later 
on, in case any convert to Christianity might 
incline that way) your Eminence creates ap- 
pearance of meeting those, who bluntly say: 
We are longing for light, but we hesitate 
to become Christians, not so much because 



— 18 — 

your religion claims to be supernatural, as 
because we suspect it to be irrational. We 
reject your authority as teachers; we reject 
Christian revelation; we take nothing for 
granted; we appeal to the court of reason 
and historical evidence. 

And your Eminence makes the proposal: 

Let us try - to meet them on their own 
ground, and accept the appeal. 

Bat your Eminence is bound by many vows 
under oath to not meet them on their own 
ground,because,whenever you enter the contest, 
you are under solemn promise, vow and oath to 
never become convinced of any theorem pecul- 
iarly theirs, or of any fact disproving your 
creed, and to reject all what be in conflict 
with, the Roman Catholic creed, And should I 
or any other agnostic convince your intellect 
of any such theorem or fact, your Eminence 
would go down on your Eminence's knees and 
exhort the Unknown to turn your mind and to 
deliver you of the wickedness of considering 
your "intellect superior to the grace of believ- 
ing in one creed only, namely in that of the 
Roman Catholic Church. 

Though your Eminence enters the arena 
with the assertion of meeting agnostics on 
their own ground, your Eminence in reality 
cannot and will not do this, but will assume 
to be inconvinceable at all times and that even 
to be convinced would be falling into error- 



— 19 — 

Your Eminence does in one place not recog- 
nize professional (learned in their convictions) 
agnostics as those to be addressed and in the 
other (as above quoted) they are represented 
as those, whom your Eminence proposes to 
meet on their own ground. As shown the 
former assertion is true and the latter asser- 
tion is false in more than one sense. 

Thus your Eminence has directed the ad- 
dress to the intellectually untrained or insuf- 
ficiently equipped, and thus your Eminence 
has prepared thoroughly for pushing aside 
and ignoring any controversing expression, 
which might emanate from a professional 
free thinker or agnostic. 

I have most carefully examined the descrip- 
tion, as your Eminence makes it of profes- 
sional free thinkers, agnostics] and other 
avowed enemies of Christianity, whom your 
Eminence excludes from all consideration. 
But finding, that none of the essential qualifi- 
cations made by your Eminence could possi- 
bly be applied to myself, and although not 
claiming to belong to the ignorant classes, as 
your Eminence describes them, I sustain a 
slight hope, that your Eminence's dignity may 
permit these present open letters to be read and 
to be considered aside of your Eminence's ad- 
dress. To prohibit, to ignore them ? to answer to 



- 20 — 

them with incriminations of the author's inten- 
tions, the author's faculties, the author's learn- 
ing, the author's character or the author's 
life, would in no wise settle the questions at 
issue, but would be in pursuance only of the 
practice of the Roman Church and of the 
method already followed by it so often of 
changing the issue from a question of fact and 
truth to one of personal incrimination. 

Before stating why I do not belongto the class 
described by your Eminence as the "profession- 
al free thinkers, agnostics and other avowed 
enemies of Christianity, for whom your Emi- 
nence's pages were not written, 'permit me to 
make the solemn declaration, that I do neither 
claim to be one only of a kind in existence, 
but that it is in my sure knowledge as the 
result of personal observation and intercourse 
on two continents for the forty years last past 
that the description, as your Eminence gives 
it of enemies of Christianity, as quoted above, 
may find its objects amongst the ignorant 
masses, born aud raised, where the Roman 
Catholic Church held them in its bondage, 
and where the endeavor to throw off its bond- 
age is steeped in hatred against the suppres- 
sion of liberty of conscience. 

But amongst those nations, who bestow a 
liberal education on their rising generations, 






— 21 — 

and who are not sufferers from church com- 
pulsion, inimity to Christianity is not a neces- 
sary complement to the search for truth, to 
free thinking and to the confession not to 
know (agnostics) many things, which your Em- 
inence claims to know. And after stating, 
that I am one only amongst many hundred 
thousands, I may add, that I am only one 
amongst them standing low in ability and 
learning and virtue when compared with their 
larger number. I now may be permitted to 
show, that your Eminence' s description neither 
describes them nor me, and that therefore I 
may raise my voice in defence of humanity 
against Roman encroachment on liberty of 
conscience. 

If amongst free thinkers there be a few, who 
make free thought their profession,io7io will ?wt 
learn, lest their knowledge might compel them 
to do well, who trade in blasphemy, (though 
your Eminence would call blasphemy ever y dis- 
cussion regarding the Supreme Being not en- 
tered upon for the absolute and exclusive pur- 
pose of proving its existence)^Ao glory in their 
infidelity and who earn for themselves a cheap 
reputation by coarsely caricaturing every 
doctrine and tradition, that Christians hold 
dear — is this a characteristic description of 
them as a class? Your Eminence's words are 



— 22 — 

of a kind with the often repeated but eternally- 
false assertion that enthusiasm for truth be be- 
gotten in vice. If your Eminence's descrip- 
tion might be called correct and then certainly 
in part only, and some of the public lecturers 
on free thought be made to stand as examples 
of the total class of free thinkers, then 
there is the .same distinction between them 
and all the other free thinkers as it is between 
the Roman Catholic clergy and the Roman 
Catholic people. 

With both, the lecturing free thinker and 
the Roman clergyman, their lecturing is a mat- 
ter of finance, and both are apt to overdo their 
task and to betray in their behavior and 
words so much of vulgarity as be inherent to 
their individual nature. Would your Emi- 
nence consider the Roman Catholic clergy 
as a class, to be reprehensible on account of 
the black sheep amongst them ? 

When I began writing the present letters, 
I sincerely hoped (on account of the im- 
portance of the subject matter treated, on 
account of the class of men, whom I hope to 
reach with these letters, and lastly but not 
leastly on account of your Eminence's dignified 
position and of my own nature) to not be car- 
ried by the qualities of your Eminence's utter- 
ances into what might appear as a neglect of 



— 23 ~ 

courtesy, even when stating facts to the full- 
ness of their value. But would it not be a 
frustration of my purpose, were I to omit to 
state the fact, in case your Eminence made a 
statement, of which it is self-evident, that your 
Eminence must have known the inaccuracy and 
even the want of veracity ? 

Can it be otherwise than known to your 
Eminence, that there are living at the present 
age on this and other continents, a distinct 
class of scientists, the intellectual labors of 
whom draw their entire vitality from their en- 
thusiasm for knowledge and truth, and the life 
of whom is in no wise inferior as to doing well 
to that of the plurality of the Catholic clergy, 
and the knowledge of whom, though it may 
have conducted them to agnosticism, does so 
much more compel them to do well, as such 
compulsion does not come from exterior au- 
thority, but from their own convictions, and 
so much more so, as it is part of their convic- 
tion, that no cause will remain without an 
effect, and in consequence, that they cannot 
efface some of the effects of their own acts, by 
simply regretting, proposing to do better in 
the future, and by confessing to one of the 
priests of the Roman Church. Can it be other- 
wise than known to your Eminence, that these 
men are no enemies of Christianity, but that 






— 24 — 

they have and confess admiration for what is 
true and noble in Christianity and for what 
christian teaching and christian charity and 
influences have accomplished and do accom- 
plish in educating humanity and in compass- 
ing its passions? 

Is it possible, that your Eminence should 
ignore, that creed and religion are two abso- 
lutely different things, that doubting, investi- ' 
gating, research for truth may well go together 
with religion, and that they in no wise involve 
scoffing at religion. 

Can it be otherwise than be known to your 
Eminence, that the cosmopolitan republic of 
scientists and enthusiasts for truth and knowl- 
edge does not as a class trade in blasphemy, 
does not coarsely caricature every doctrine 
and tradition, that Christians hold dear. 
(Huxley, Tyndall, and a hundred thousand 

others.) 

Can it be otherwise than be known to your 

Eminence, that men, such as you truly state, 
that they were found in every age, by the ver y 
earnestness of their nature, by the very enthu- 
siasm of their convictions, though they may 
glory in their own consciousness over their 
emancipation from intellectual bondage, must 
by the very nature of their tendencies 
tender the charity of tolerance to those 



— 25 — 

living under orthodox authority, that they can 
not glory in what your Eminence calls infidel- 
ity on their part,but what in reality should be 
called on the part of orthodox believers the 
intellectual bondage, in which the majority of 
humanity is held as yet. And must it not be- 
knownof necessity to your Eminence, that ra- 
tional criticism of the Scriptures is not one of 
the essential distinctions as between the Ro- 
man Catholic church and orthodox Protestant- 
ism on the one side and Agnosticism on the 
other. 

And is it otherwise possible, than that your 
Eminence should know, that it be not true 
what your Eminence states, namely that they 
(the agnostics) will insist on knowing every- 
thing regarding the incomprehensible Deity 
and His attributes. 

Your Eminence does know, that it is the 
very characteristic confession, on which agnos- 
ticism rests, of knowing nothing about an in- 
comprehensible Deity and His attributes, while 
the Roman church teaches on the church's 
own authority to every man, woman and child 
willing to listen all about the imcomprehensi- 
ble Deity and His attributes. 

If your Eminence claims, that, because ag- 
nostics admit mysteries in the material world, 
they must accept as true mysteries in the 



— 26 — 

supernatural world, and that their rejecting of 
dogmas of the Roman church cannot be approv- 
ed by philosophy or sound sense, then this is, as 
far as philosophy is concerned, not quite cor- 
rect, because, if your Eminence's philosophy 
does not, theirs does, and as far as sound sense 
be concerned, agnostics evidently rely in all 
their conclusions on repeatable, testable ob- 
servations made by sound human senses, be- 
waring with utmost assiduity against illusions 
and hallucinations, of both of which they be- 
lieve a considerable admixture to be contained 
in what the Roman Catholic Church considers 
as revelations. 

Those only ignorant of the facts, as they 
exist, can be impressed by your Eminence's 
statements, such as hereabove printed. With 
the educated part of humanity they can to the 
best create a suspicion only against teachings 
and practices, the pre-eminent representative 
of which must recur to such means of misrep- 
resentation in order to hold his own. 

That your Eminence has specifically de- 
clared (page 4, etc.) to have written for those 
who unaware of causes or reasons have left or 
are withheld from the fold of the church is in- 
deed no justification for misrepresentations as 
to the character and qualities of their assumed 
leaders, who with full consciousness and by 



— 27 — 

their own free intellectual selection stand' out- 
side of the realm of the Roman Church and 
of orthodoxism in general. 



SECOND LETTER 

What may be Known and Proven 
and What Not. 

Your Eminence 

Has collected with great learnedness all 
such evidence, as will make the existence of 
a self conscious eternal Supreme Being and 
Creator of the Universe appear as highly pro- 
bable, and far be it from the undersigned to 
deny such existence. But your Eminence 
thereby produces the impression, as if your 
Eminence considered facts and quotations as 
stated as sufficient rational proofs of such 
existence, thus claiming a faculty, which j^our 
Eminence, a human being, does not possess, 
namely, the faculty of rendering proof, using 
natural faculties therefore, for a supernatural 
theorem. 

I specifically protest against being misinter- 
preted to the effect, as if I undertook to deny 
what your Eminence claims to have proven. 
Were I to deny what to prove or to disprove 
is beyond human faculty, I should commit 
the same error or produce the same erronous 
impression, as your Eminence's book does, 
namely of proving what is unprovable. The 
following exposition will more specifically 
define the position thus taken, and it should 
be here stated, that in such exposition there are 



— 29 — 

quoted long passages from the English edition 
of a medical book (singled out by different 
type), written for the people at large, by one 
of the greatest anatomists and physiologists 
of the present century, and edited after his 
death by other men not less devoted to natural 
truth than the original author. 

If it be within human faculty to observe by 
the use of human senses, to ascertain facts by 
methodically repeating and testing observa- 
tions and to thus establish elementary facty, 
and to therefrom form logical conclusions and 
to subject these conclusions and results to 
critical test and to systematize a series of facts 
into a science, if all this be within human 
faculties, than we may accept the following 
facts as having been established. 

1. Man is a part of nature and is subject in 
special to all the laws, which govern nature 
in general. 

2. Therefore what is true for all natural 
things at large is true for man also in special. 

3. There is in nature no effect, but where 
there be a natural cause conditional to such 
effect. 

4. All effects in nature are the results of 
causes consisting in a change in their mutual 
relations or in relation to space at large of 
substances either ponderable or imponder- 
able, although what appears as yet as such a 
distinct substance may be a modified quality 
of the same substance, and the cause then be 
a mutual modification of specific states of the 
same substance, 



— 30 — 

5. Human thought is an effect of a natural 
cause, as all other effects in nature are. 

All what is perceptible by human senses 
is subject to methodical critical observation 
under the same given conditions and is part of 
nature,and is thus subject to being ascertained 
by human investigation. And what is not 
perceptible ttf human senses and is not subject 
to methodical critical observation under re- 
peated given conditions and what therefore is 
not part of nature is called supernatural. 

In consequence the dividing line, between natural 
and supernatural theorems, is a well defined one. 
Natural theorems can be proven to the satis- 
faction of a large overwhelming majority of those 
having stored within them what mainly constitutes 
human knowledge concerning the subject matter 
under consideration, such proofs resulting from the 
observation by our senses of natural facts and 
from methodical conclusion based thereon. And such 
proof can be repeated with the obtainable condi- 
tions therefor methodically prepared. 

Supernatural theorems can not be proven by 
actual repeatable observation, but they must be ac- 
cepted if at all, on the basis of historical events, 
claimed to be true and to be correctly represented, and 
on the authority of records concerning such events 
as prepared by men not as yet gifted with the 
modern capability of methodical observation and 
investigation and inclined with the balance of 
humanity of their time, to attribute to the super- 



— 81 — 

natural all, they as yet did not understand to be part 
and parcel of the activity of observable natural 
things and forces. 

A difference further lies in the fact, that the know- 
ledge of natural facts does not claim anything but 
what can be ascertained to the satisfaction of human 
observation, while it is claimed in favor of the super- 
natural, that concerning it we have, as an act of 
voluntary submission of our intellect, to accept what 
the intellect cannot understand, and that the capabi- 
lity of such submission be a gift (grace with catho- 
lics, etc.,) from divinity, which divinity is accepted 
to be in nature and to fill space and to possess the 
faculty to become at times observable to our senses 
or of which as the thought (logical expression of 
thought) the universe is the body. 

It is thus clear, that the difference between 
natural and supernatural theorems consists 
mainly in the possibility on the one hand of 
u^oevtaimng facts with regard to natural sub- 
ject matter, while with regard to supernatural 
theorems on the other hand we possess no 
such possibility but the liberty for assuming 
only. 

" One of the main supernatural questions we all 
feel highly interested in, is that, as to whether on the 
total cessation of organic activity in our body and 
while that body is re- dissolving into the chemical 
elements and compounds, of which its organic struc- 
ture was built up, and when the totality called our 
individuality and personality is either totally falling 



— 32 — 

apart or if kept together by artificial means, no 
longer partakes as such in the movement and 
changes of substances as pertaining to the life of the 
body, whether then permanently or temporarily, 
separate from said dead body or from the natural 
elements which constitute it, another different or 
separate individuality, not being subject to methodi- 
cal observation and not subject to the laws of physi- 
cal nature, in special not subject to the law, that two 
different and separate substances cannot fill the 
same space, and not subject to the law of gravity, 
does continue to exist. 

The science treating on natural subjects confesses 
that it does not be within its possibilities, to either 
affirmatively or negatively answer this question (ag- 
nosco). That in consequence it has no opinion in 
the premises, and that indeed the question is no part 
of the science of natural things, but that the science 
about supernatural questions, theology namely, has 
been striving since the earliest times in the history 
of mankind, to settle this question with the result, 
that as a matter of teaching on supernatural subjects 
the plurality of mankind thus believe such individ- 
uality to continue in existence. 

Another main point at issue between theologians 
(claiming to know) on the one 3] and and agnostics 
(claiming not to know) on the other hand, is ex- 
pressed in the question, as to whether natural evolu- 
tion (Darwinism), does sufficiently (rationally) ac- 
count for life and consciousness, or whether the event 
of the first step to evolution does not remain unac- 
counted for, and whether this unexplained first fact 



— 33 — 

in serial evolution does not constitute the bridge 
between naturalism and supernaturalism,* and the 
selection lies in this case between the proud claim of 
authority and the modest confession of ignorance. 

Each human individual develops the faculty to 
make distinction between its own individuality and 
the totality of surrounding nature through its own 
sensual perception, such perception being limited in 
time and quantity, to the period of existence of the 
individual, and whichever knowledge the individual 
may acquire of facts preceding its own existence in 
time is in all cases a matter first of intellectual 
transmission and second of comparison. That 
humantiy should not possess the faculty of under- 
standing the primitive origin of all natural things is 
self evident, men being a part only of nature, and in 
consequence unable of consciousness beyond the 
limits of natural things. 

Therefore what no man possessed the faculty 
of perceiving and understanding could not be 
truly revealed by one man to another. 

Nevertheless from the time, when man 
first began to make the distinction between 
himself and his surroundings, different beliefs 
and creeds have taken possession of the human 
mind as the result of assumed revelation. 

But the methodically and critically observ- 
ing man of the present age is not satisfied to 
accept all as true, what has been a part and 



;: The question as to the controversy between u Genesis" 
and " Evolution " will be referred to again further on. 



— 34 — 

parcel of the belief of his ancestors, simply 
because he has by actual observation and test 
ascertained a great part of such belief to have 
been and to be error, contrary to fact and im- 
possible. And as a result a considerable part 
of present humanity doubts all, that cannot be 
proven. 

And it is admitted by all men having en- 
joyed a non-seqtarian education and intellec- 
tual training: 

That the exclusive and sole possible proof for any 
supernatural theorem must be looked for within the 
limits of intercourse (communication) between the 
supernatural and natural. Communication from the 
supernatural to the natural, being then called revela- 
tion, and from the natural to the supernatural 
being called prayer. 

At the same degree, as we have succeeded in pre- 
paring and perfecting tools and instruments, by which 
the observations and perceptions of our senses are 
aided, at the same rate we have drawn into the realm 
of natural things and facts subjects theretofore be- 
longing to the number of supernatural mysteries. 

What a few centuries ago we would have consid- 
ered as witchcraft, our courts punishing it with the 
penalty of death, we now pay for having it done be- 
fore our eyes in the way of entertainment and 
amusement. 

But if in this manner anything is presented to us, 
which is observable to our senses, but which is 
claimed to be supernatural, such presentation is a 
fraud on its face, because our senses are totally lack- 



— m — 

ing all capability beyond receiving impressions from 
natural causes, and whatever be at the time of obser- 
vation not clearly the effect of a natural cause, will 
on methodical observation prove to be so, and the 
cause for doubt only lies in the insufficient or in the 
unmethodical manner of observation. In the history 
of early humanity almost all that man could not eat 
and drink, and because methodical ohservation was 
as yet not part of human faculties — was by men set 
apart as belonging to the supernatural. Intellectual 
laziness being then, as it is now, an essential quality 
of humanity at large, it results therefrom, that by the 
masses real knowledge about natural things is but 
very, very slowly absorbed, while these masses will- 
ingly accept on the basis of authorities to them quoted 
and against them claimed and without any trouble 
to them of intellectual labor, a great quantity of 
theorems relating to supernatural subjects, the qual- 
ity of theorems varying considerably under the in- 
fluence of surroundings, company, individual inter- 
est, ambition, vanity, pride, ancestors, tradition, 
habit etc, etc." 

"All human creeds ginate in the acceptance of 
revelations. There" no creed can possibly be 
proven (as a matliL iatical theorem can), by intel- 
lectual construction only, unless the existence, 
nature and correctness of revelation be accepted on 
the basis of a record thereof based on the perception, 
(certainly not infallible) of one or another human in- 
dividual, whose authority in the premises is based in 
all cases without any exception on the individual's 
own statement concerning said revelation, which 



— 36 — 

may be supported or brought about by favorable 
coincidences. 

It is this the aid (revelation) your Eminence 
refers to as the human reason being in need of, 
in your utterence on page 303: 

If the ideas of time and space and the rela- 
tion of soul to body are beyond our compre- 
hension, we cannot be expected with* our un- 
aided reason to explain away the apparent 
incongruities that we find between the unseen 
and the visible kingdom of the universe. 

You virtually admit all, what has been here- 
above stated as to the limits to human facul- 
ties. But the fact is, that agnostics ask to be 
excused from acceptingsuch aid, for which the 
support of proof is lacking, as for the supernat- 
ural (unseen) kingdom of the universe it does. 

After your Eminence has quoted on numer- 
ous pages so-called evidences for the existence 
of God, such as many thousands more of 
l>n.ges might have been filled with- to the same 
jmrpose, your Eminence raises the question. 

How, then, are we to account for this moral 
unanimity of mankind, in acknowledging a 
Supreme Being? There is but one rational 
solution to be given, which may be thus briefly 
expressed: God enlightens with the light of 
reason every man that cometh into the world. 
Guided by that light, toe recognize the Creator 
from the contemplation of His toorks. We 
naturally and, without effort of mind, associ- 



- S7 - 

ale the Architect with the temple of nature 
luminously standing before us, just as the 
human voice sounding in our ears, is associ- 
ated in our mind with a speaker hidden from 
our mem. How can our soul listen in silent 
wonder to the heavenly music of the spheres, 
without admiring the divine Composer? We 
cannot separate the Builder from His work. 
We cannot admire the masterpiece without 
bestowing a thought on the great Artist. The 
connection is inseparable. The invisible 
Author is "clearly seen, being understood by 
the things that are made."- 1 

By the same light of reason, we see also 
within us a moral law written on our hearts. 
We perceive an essential difference between 
right and wrong, good and evil, virtue and 
vice. From the recognition of this universal 
law, we inevitably infer a universal Law- 
giver. We hear a voice within us judging 
us, commending or condemning us; and from 
the imperious judgment pronounced upon us, 
we conclude that there exists a Sovereign Judge. 

And thus God reveals Himself to us as our 
Creator, as our Lawgiver, as our Judge. As 
our Creator, He manifests Himself to us by 
His Works. As our Lawgiver, He speaks to 
us by His law written on our hearts. As our 
Judge, He speaks to us by the voice of con- 
science. We apprehend Him by our reason^ 

~^Bom. I., 20. 



— 38 — 

our moral sense, and our conscience. And, 
therefore, as long as man continues to exer- 
cise his intellectual and moral faculties, so 
long will he profess his faith in the exist- 
ence of a living God. 

Assuming for the sake of argument all this 
to be true, what does all of this prove in favor 
of a '-knowledge of the Supernatural." To 
the best it can prove only, that by a voluntary 
act of assumption we may be led to accept, 
what our intellect has no faculty to conceive 
And there i3 nothing in all this more in 
favor of Christianity than of Buddhism, and 
again your Eminenc asserts on page 252, that 
u the divine mission of Christ is demonstrated 
by the marvelous propagation and perpetuity 
of the Christian religion. " If permanence and 
a striking approach to universality on the 
part of a creed are proofs of a divine origin, 
majr they not be invoked on behalf of Buddh- 
ism, which started some five centuries earlier 
than Christianity, and includes among its 
votaries a much larger fraction of the human 
race than the Roman Catholic Church or even 
Christianity at large, there being known to 
exist on the surface of our globe: 160,000,000 
idolatry practicing human beings; 180,000,000 
Mohammedans; 400,000,000 Christians; 740,- 
000,000 confessors of Buddha or Brahma. 

It would bring the present letter beyond 
what "the busv restless class" would take in. 



— 80 — 

were I to prolong the refutation in special of 
your Eminence's proofs of harmony between 
science and revelation. Suffice it to say, 
that, though the human heart may at times 
yearn for a power stronger than man to find 
refuge and support with, such yearning proves 
naught in favor of revelation. 

Of all the Revelations, the boldest, as far as 
the human intellect be concerned, is undoubted- 
ly the book "Genesis", of which Moses, the 
leader of Isrealites on their return to Asia 
Minor, is the author. 

And all what scientists had to show in evi- 
dence of an absolute human origin of this 
book namely, that it contained : 

1. many facts, of which Moses had no knowl- 
edge and could have none. 

2. many facts, of which the one set is in con- 
tradiction with the other set. 

3. many facts, of which it can be proven, by 
what is within human knowledge about nat- 
ural things, that they are not true or to be the 
reverse of truth or to be impossible. 

All this your Eminence calls: "childish 
declamation" applying the qualification to 
Messrs. Huxley and Draper directly. 

I omit qualifying such expressions, they do 
this themselves even before the most simple 
minded. And is your Eminence really in ear- 
nest in claiming, that these men should be hin- 



- 40 - 

dered from publishing the result of their re- 
searches by gratitude towards their predeces- 
sors on the path of research. Besides do they 
not believe, that their predecessors could not 
possibly have uttered the same results and 
convictions, had they arrived at them? 

With the blood of hundreds of thousands 
has humanity conquered the freedom of con- 
science again3t inquisition, persecution and 
death, wielded against those indulging in such 
" childish declamation" as to assert that rev- 
elation be a sham. 

Your Eminence notwithstanding these 
"childish declamations", on which of old there 
was the penalty of death, then deliberately and 
solemnly undertakes to prove that ''there will 
never be any collision, but the most perfect 
harmony will ever exist between science and 
religion" And then your Eminence con- 
tinues to declaim about God, the source of 
science and truth, such as Christianity de- 
fends it, as if "revelation" itself were an 
accepted fact, and as if your Eminence had 
already rendered proof of what had yet to be 
proven, 

It is this a result only of the sophistical 
audacity, with which nothing is called "rea- 
son" but what will reason out the theorems, 
as the church teaches them. 

And the rabiate dictum "that is {this mate- 
rial world) shall have an end" (page 305), this 
contradiction in total of all the results of natu- 



— 41 — 

ral science, is quoted in proof, of bow the church 

stands on the side of reason. And the reason 
of all scientists, who were once deeply steeped 
in Christianity is relegated to incompetency 
by the quotation from Paul: "It is morally 
impossible," says Paul, l 'for those who were 
once illuminated by faith, who have tasted 
also the heavenly gift, who were made par- 
takers of the Holy Ghost, and who have 
fallen away by apostacy, to return once more 
to the faith of their fathers." 

If your Eminence nevertheless makes the 
attempt to harmonize so-called revelation (the 
church) with the acknowledged results of 
science. your Eminence assumes the same posi- 
tion, as the Church lias invariably assumed, 
namely, to explain away the Church's former 
teachings as soon as reason had succeeded to 
produce incontrovertable proof to the con- 
trary. 

We are told for instance, on page 313, that 
"it is often erroneously assumed, that Scrip- 
tures propound doctrines, which they never 
professed to teach. The sacred volume was 
not intended by its divine author to give us a 
scientific treatise on astronomy or cosmogony 
or geology, or even a complete series of chro- 
nology or genealogy. These matters are inci- 
dentally introduced to illustrate a higher sub- 
ject. The purpose of the Scriptures is to re- 
count God's super natural relations with man- 



— 42 — 

hind, his providential government of the 
world, and man'' s moral obligations to his 
Creator :" 

It is not so long ago, when the church as- 
sumed the authority to settle scientific ques- 
tions of astronomy, cosmogony and geology 
on the very contrary claim to your Eminence's 
assertion hereabove quoted, namely, that the 
true source fo'r all human knowledge be the 
Bible (the word of the Lord) and the Roman 
Church's interpretation thereof. But your 
Eminence may permit the undersigned to fol- 
low your Eminence's endeavors to explain 
away the position formerly held by the Roman 
Church. 

Your Eminence proceeding to a particular 
example states : 

" When for instance the Sacred Text de- 
clares, that the sun stood still in the heavens, 
it simply gives expression to the miraculous 
prolongation of the day ; and this in popular 
language, such as even now, with our im- 
proved knowledge of astronomy, we employ, 
for we speak of the rising and the setting of 
the sun as if, according to the Ptolemaic sys- 
tem, we still believed, that he revolves around 
the earth". 

But your Eminence does omit to state, that 
this very method of expressing contrary to 
facts in our daily intercourse is only one of the 
many consequences of the Church sustaining, 



— 43 — 

favoring, upholding absolutely erroneous 
teachings. What a hard light with the church 
or its followers have Copernicus, Kepler and 
Galileo had in trying to disabuse humanity 
of this very error! Kepler's book "Epitome 
of the Copernican Astronomy" was on ap- 
pearance (1622) placed on the list of prohib- 
ited books by the Congregation of the index 
at Rome. 

Kepler's biographer Sir David Brewster M. 
A., D. C. L. states p. 223 of " Martyrs of Sci- 
ence," "the moment Kepler learned this from 
his correspondent Remus, he was thrown 
into great alarm, and requested from him 
some information respecting the terms and 
consequences of the censure, which was thus 
pronounced upon his worfc. He was afrwid, 
that it might compromise his personal safety, 
if he went to Italy; — that he might be com- 
pelled to retract his opinions; — that the cen- 
sure migJit extend to Austria-, — that the sale 
of his work would be ruined; and that he 
must either abandon his country or his 
opinions. 

Passing over from Astronomy to Geology 
your Eminenc has the following: (p. 314). 

"The results of geological investigation, 
by which it is claimed, that ages must have 
elapsed between the formation of matter and 
the creation of man, would seem to conflict 
with the Book of Genesis, which states, that 



— 44 — 

all vegetable and animal life was created with- 
in the space of six days. But the Church, as 
is well known, has never defined the meaning 
to be attached to those days of Genesis. We 
are at liberty, as far as the Church is con- 
cerned, and if the deductions of science are 
incontrovertible, toe are compelled to ascribe 
an indefinite period of years to each day. 
The context itself insinuates, that the day 
cannot be restricted to twenty-four hours, 
since, for the first three days, there was no 
sun to measure their duration: and in the 
second chapter of Genesis the word day is 
manifestly used to express an indefinite 
period of time employed in the creation of 
the material universe" 

Your Eminence's statement, that "the con- 
text it self ' 'insinuates' ', that the day cannot be 
restricted to twenty-four hours, even for the 
first three days, since for the first three days, 
there tor>s no sua to measure their duration 
by can be accounted for only by the easy going, 
futile method with which your E. deals with 
great scientific questions in contrast with the 
intense care bestowed on explaining away 
doubts as to the correctness of Genesis. 

It never was the sun by which the day was 
measured One revolution (return of the same 
point to the same location relative to the cen, 
tre of its gravitation) of the earthball has al- 
ways measured the day. Genesis says nothing 



— 45 — 

about the ball being set a rolling later on. So 
it must be assumed that "Genesis" intended to 
reveal, that the Lord set the ball a rolling on 
the day of creation, and then there was the 
condition given to measure the day by. But the 
fact in the premises is, that the Roman ChuBcli 
has forcibly receded now from the position of 
claiming to possess in Bible (the so-called word 
of the Lord) and in apostolic tradition the ex- 
clusive source for all truth and science. That 
much has been decidedly gained, and it is im- 
possible for the Roman Church to now cover 
up its own tracks. 

Besides your Eminence is well aware, that 
the objections of scientists to the teaching of 
Genesis do not turn merely or mainly rest on 
the duration of the epoch signified by the 
Hebrew word translated "day," but relate 
rather to the order, in which several creative 
processes are said to have taken place. 

Your Eminence affirms that "the chronologi- 
cal order of Moses is borne out by the re- 
searches of geologists, who have discovered 
that vegetable fossils are anterior to animal 
remains, and that those of the lower animals 
are more ancient than those of any human 
skeletons ever found." 

Now this order as described in Genesis, is 
not so unconditionally admitted, as your Em- 
inence claims it to be, Natural Science having 
wiped out altogether the division lines be- 



— 46 — 

tween the vegetable and animal kingdom, the 
two being so much blended one with the other, 
that but for the reverence to bible and habit, 
the distinction would be obsolete altogether. 
Your Eminence might, in order to prove with 
scientific thoroughness, have taken up the 
Scriptural assertions seriatim and explained 
more explicitly some of their inconsistencies 
in respect of creative order with the univers- 
ally accepted conclusions of scientists. We 
read in Genesis, for instance, that the earth, 
one of the least considerable of the planets, 
was created one "day" before the sun, the 
center of the system to which the earth belongs. 
We also read, that vegetable life, with its in- 
finite variety of herb and tree, was brought 
forth at a date anterior to the existence of 
solar light and heat. Again we read, that 
winged fowl were brought forth on the "day" 
preceding that, on which creeping things or 
reptiles were created, although, if anything 
be considered an established fact in natural 
history, it is, that reptiles preceded birds. 
These are the crucial points in the record 
of Genesis, to harmonize which, with the re- 
sults of scientific investigation, would, in- 
deed, constitute a greater marvel of Christian 
apologetics than as yet has been attempted. 

Again your Eminence in the 19th chapter, 
bearing the caption, "Origin and Destiny 
of Man a viewed by Modern Unbelief," 



— 47 — 

with great assurance denies three things: 
first, that mankind be descended from sev- 
eral pairs of progenitors instead of the 
single pair named in the scriptural record; 
second^ that mankind be descended from the 
lower animals, or, to speak more specifically, 
from anthropoid apes; third, that species be 
produced by variation and adaptation to en- 
vironment under the law of natural selection 
instead of being each the outcome of an in- 
dependent act of creation. As to the first 
negation it may be said, that scientists them- 
selves are not agreed upon the question, 
whether all men are descended from a single 
pair. To many, however, it seems more in 
accordance with analogy to assume, that all or 
most of the members of particular species of ape 
developed man-like aptitudes and thus took 
the first steps in the evolution of the 7iomo,ihan 
to attribute this step to two individuals. 
The matter being, nevertheless, subjudice the 
teachers both of science and religion are for 
the present at liberty to deny or to affirm. 
With regard to the repudiation of the 
theory, that mankind be descended from 
anthropoid apes, the physiologist will acknow- 
ledge, that the last link is as yet missing in 
the chain of evidence brought foward in sup- 
port of that conclusion. But, as up to a few 
years ago, a similar gap existed in the genea- 
logy of the horse, which has since, been 



— 48 — 

clear!} 7 filled, the prudence practiced by 
Papacy on so many other occasions, where 
notwithstanding all the revelations at the com- 
mand of the Pope and of the propaganda Udei 
at Rome the decision w r as deferred or refused 
on account of the uncertainty of the ground, 
the church did stand on, might be commended. 

Were it not for some other discrepencies 
and anachronisms as against the story told in 
the book Genesis, the Roman Catholic Church 
might adopt Mr A. R. Wallace's view with 
regard to the origin of man. Mr. Wallace, 
in his latest contribution to the discussion of 
this topic, admits, that the physical part of 
man must have descended from some simian 
progenitor, but he insists, that the step from 
the ape to the man could not have been taken 
without the infusion of a soul, which sounds 
quite biblical. 

In affirming the independent creation and 
immutability of species your Eminence dis- 
cards a belief, which now is universal 
among scientists. There is notwithstanding 
this denial on your Eminence's part no known 
man of science now living and enjoying the 
respect of his co-laborers, who rejects the fun- 
damental principle of Darwinism, viz., that 
species are evolved by variation under the laws 
of natural selection. 

The real question at issue seems to be be- 
tween the Church and agnostics : Shall human- 



— 49 — 

ity be deceived concerning what it would like 
to know but cannot know? The church an- 
swers : I do not deceive, because I was told 
what I teach by revelation, which I believe to 
have told the truth. 

And agnostics answer : 

Those revelations are unproven, and there is 
suspicion, that they were the prodjict of 
illusion and hallucination or even of fraud 
right out. Hence we doubt, disbelieve and 
remain satisfied with believing only what can 
be proven. 



THIRD LETTER. 
On Miracles. 

Your Eminence 

May permit me to aver, that from the pre 
ceding statement concerning the limits of 
human intellectual faculties it is evident, 
that as man does not possess the possibility 
of ascertaining whatever be not part and par- 
cel of nature, it is likewise not in his faculty 
to ascertain the negative of any supernatural 
theorem, and as a consequence acceptance or 
refusal remains a matter of individual selec- 
tion. 

Atheists say: There is no Supreme Selfcon- 
cious Being distinct from nature as such. 

Pantheists say: Nature and the Self con- 
scious Supreme Being are one. 

Both these philosophical schools are on 
the same side with Christianity in either 
asserting or denying what is beyond human 
knowledge. 

But Agnostics say: We do not know 
but what is part of observable nature and that 
not all and beyond that nothing. Whenever 
man follows his selection and inclination 
in assuming one or another of the theorems ad- 
vanced concerning the so-called supernatural, 



— 51 - 

whatever, he may thus assume, can never 
become knowledge as the result of observa- 
tion by our senses, but will and must remain 
the product of a voluntary resolution to as- 
sume as true what can not be proven. All 
pretenses to the contrary are the results either 
of illogical construction or of distortion of 
facts. 

It being admitted, that all creeds (dogmas) 
can find their justification only in revelation 
from the supernatural, but having shown at 
the same time, that it is beyond the human 
faculty to perceive the supernatural, it remains 
to consider the possibility or probability of a 
revelation from the supernatural taking the 
form of natural things and substances. Assum- 
ing, that such taking of a natural form by the 
supernatural be possible, then there are two 
ways, in which possibility may be assumed to 
evolve into a fact. 

The one alternate way assumed as possible 
be the penetration of universal nature as such 
by the supernatural. 

In this assumed case all, what has been 
said with regard to nature, applies to the 
supernatural also, it having become identical 
with natural substance and having been 
proven to be subject to natural laws and to be 
observable by men, to the extent only of 
natural existence. 

The other alternate way assumed as possible 



— 52 — 

would be the identification of the super- 
natural with selected, single, .sporadic natural 
objects. 

And such identification of the second class 
is ordinarily claimed under the name of divine 
quality in otherwise human beings or of mira- 
cle as the substance of revelation, on which 
creeds are based and built. 

In accordance therewith your Eminence 
gives the assurance (page 240) that miracles 
have always been justly regarded as the most 
luminous and convincing evidence in support 
of the doctrines they confirm, and this certain- 
ly would be so, were it not for the peculiar 
state of affairs, that since humanity acquired 
the faculty of methodical observation and 
tests, all miracles have ceased, and none of 
those on record can be repeated, and such 
records as exist of miracles, when subjected 
to critical investigation, have invariably 
proven insufficient to substantiate the facts. 

And the records of the most miraculous of 
all miracles the creation of the universe as 
recorded in Moses's book, "Genesis" has 
been proven to be contradictory in itself and 
the next thereto the taking of human indi- 
vidual shape of a tripartite interest in 
divinity itself is seriously menaced in its 
credit by the non-existence of secular proof of 
the existence at any time or anywhere of 
the individual so referred to. 



— 53 — 

With all this the distinction should be made 
as between a believer on the testimony of 
miracles and a believer without miracles. 

He, who requires miracles in order to be- 
lieve, is an old fashioned agnostic of a lower 
intellectual order, because, when he imagined 
he saw a miracle, his infantile intellect ac- 
cepted such miracle as proof, and he believed 
in consequence. 

In order to completely carry out the doc- 
trine, that to believe be a virtue and the result 
of divine grace, a dogma of the Roman Church, 
to which I shall be compelled to again refer 
later on, it would appear more consistent in 
the Roman Church, not even to point to mira- 
cles in support of her faith. As to this 
Mohammet did take a more correct position, be- 
cause in Chapter XIII. (near the end) of the 
Kor&n he quotes the following as to him re- 
vealed by the Lord: 

"Though a Kor&n were revealed, by which 
mountains should be removed, or the earth 
cleaved in sunder, or the dead be caused to 
speak, it would be in vain" 

It is thus, that Mohammet could dispense 
with miracles and nevertheless demand, 
"faith" on the part of his followers; and he 
formulated this demand in the same chapter 
as follows: 

u To this purpose have we sent down the 
Kor&a a rule of judgment, " 



— 54 — 

The Roman Church nevertheless has con- 
tinued to claim miracles, the records on beat- 
ification bristling with their recital. And 
even in modern times such things as the 
motion of the eyes of the picture of the 
Virgin at Siena and the apparition of the 
Virgin in the tree at Lourdes have been sup- 
ported in their credit by the clergy of the 
Roman Church. And it is generally believed, 
that the time has come, when it may be con- 
sidered as opportune, that the Virgin make 
her appearance somewhere on this continent, 
so as to prepare for an object of pilgrimage, 
the practice thereof having always been essen- 
tially a practice of the Roman Church, the 
same materially contributing towards the in- 
tensity of faith in the minds of the pilgrims 
and giving an outlet to the fervor of all desi- 
rous of becoming connected with some mira- 
culous event. 

In fact, miracles have been claimed by the 
Roman Church to such an extent, that a reac- 
tion must result. As a consequence reasoning 
humanity shrunk back from them, and it is at 
present rather highly appreciated by the com- 
mon mortal, that so little is seen of them, and 
this is attributed to scepticism as to their very 
existence. 

Since the test of methodical observation has 
in this matter done away with illusions, hallu- 
cinations, false pretences, miracles are not 



— 55 — 

easily indulged in either by saints or other 
common mortals, except by the irrepressible 
spiritualists, who notwithstanding the mani- 
fold exposures of intentional fraud on the 
part of their mediums, continue this trade 
of deception, and indeed the Roman Church 
must be congratulated to have nothing in 
common with them not even miracles. "What 
fools these mortals be" to have accepted mir- 
acles at all in the way they have done. 



FOURTH LETTER. 

The Real Position of the Roman Catholic 
Church Towards Agnosticism in 
Contrast With Cardinal 
Gibbons' Attempt to 
Prove the Super- 
natural. 

Will your Eminence permit to assume for 
the sake of argument, that an agnostic by the 
reading of your Eminence's book had become 
convinced, first of the existence of the super- 
natural and of the Supreme Being as the self- 
conscious creator of the universe, second of 
the immortality of the human soul, third of 
the divinity of Christ, fourth of the Roman 
Pontifex being the true representative of 
Christ on earth, and of the Roman Church 
possessing the real and true teachings of 
Christ. 

Would with all this he have become a Roman 
Catholic, in full harmony with the teachings 
of the Roman Church? Inconceivable as this 
may appear on the face of the assertion, your 
Eminency knows, that then as yet he should 
not be a true Roman Catholic, and why not ? 
Simply because it is heresy, according to the 
Roman Church, that the true catholic's faith 



— 57 — 

be the result of intellectual conclusion,* of 
that intellectual conclusion alone be the proper 
basis for such creed, while the virtue of faith 
is thought to be such proper basis and a gift 
from divine grace. Thus were a hundred thou- 
sand agnostics ready as a consequence of your 
Eminence's persuasion to abandon agnosticism, 
because their intellects had been led by your 
Eminence to conclusions otherwise in harmo- 
ny with the teachings of the Roman Church, 
your Eminence would before admitting them 
have to demand as the agent of the Church the 
abjuration on their part of their belief being 
the exclusive result of their intellectual labors, 
and your Eminence would have to demand 
the acknowledgement on their part, that their 
belief and faith be founded in divine grace, 
and not on their own intellectual labors. 

In other words the agnostic can enter the 
fold of the Roman Church only as a matter of 
choice, selection and inclination and not as a 
matter of intellectual conclusion, the agnostic 
by a voluntary act assuming to have been en- 
dowed (as if by an unprovable supernatural 
power, enchantment) with the grace of faith. 

Strange as it may appear, divinity does not 

* Reference is made to the decrees setting the books of 
Prof. Hermes on the Index Librorum Prohibuorum as 
containing heresy and to other evidence to the same effect. 



— 68 — 

bestow such grace on agnostics as a rule, and 
your Eminence should therefore feel rather 
pity with these disfavored mortals, and it 
would be more rational and more charitable, if 
your Eminence would have words of kind- 
ness and of amiable persuasion for them in- 
stead of rational reasoning, which will do 
them no good,^ and of rebukes and accusation, 
which are not founded on fact. 

And is it not giving an evidence of weak- 
ness of your Eminence's cause to attempt to 
convince the intellectually untrained, while 
the prof essionals in the matter of philosophy 
and research are met with the declaration, that 
they should be considered as 7wrs du combat. 

It thus happens, that the undersigned 
raises the claim of more truly defining the 
road to Roman Catholicism in special or to or- 
thodoxy in general, than your Eminence has 
defined it in the book on "Our Christian Her- 
itage.'" 

Let the membership of any orthodox creed 
community be a matter of selection, inclina- 
tion and of the welfare of the people at large, 
rather than to attempt to convince (since vio- 
lence is no longer applicable), by reasoning 
out theorems being beyond the conception of 
human reason. Let religion be a matter of 
sentiment and of charity rather than of dog- 
ma and intellect. 



FIFTH LETTER. 

Different Methods of Propagating the 
Roman Catholic Faith under 
Different Circumstances. 
Your Eminence 

Creeds, being practically amongst the human race 
a matter of surrounding influences and of individual 
inclinations, are essentially a matter of individ- 
ual right also to the extent only of non-inter- 
ference with the equal right of all other human 
individuals, and to the limit as far as so-called 
religious practices are concerned, of non-intrusion on 
the equal welfare of others. As a consequence there- 
of the government of worldly affairs violates the 
equal rights of one part of living humanity by favor- 
ing the creed of another part, and no government 
can be a just government to all citizens, unless it be 
totally and absolutely disconnected from any and 
all creeds, while it may regulate by law on a basis 
of equality the relations of creed communities to 
natural things (Persons and property)." 

And all creeds being based either on assump- 
tions with regard to aupernatural theorems or 
on the assertions of individual men (or women) 
as to communications received from the un- 
proven supernatural realm, no creed can 
claim an absolute rational proof for the neces- 
sity of being accepted by humanity at large. 
Their legitimate medium of propagation should 
therefore bv persuasion alone. But the history 



— 60 — 

of mankind is evidence of the tendency in some 
creeds (Catholicism, Mohammedanism) to use 
brutal power and physical compulsion for 
such propagation. 

If (on page 268) your Eminence asserts: 
The church draws no sword to enforce her 
authority, then this is only one of the many 
sophistical differenciations between ; 'doing and 
having done, n or "having caused to be done." 
The church educated its followers at all times 
to the belief "that to propagate A. M. D. G. 
the realm of the church would justify war, 
shedding of blood, compulsion and tyranny, 
and history does contradict your Eminence in 
so many instances that none need be quoted. 

But as the less educated are also expected 
to read this present protest against the Propa- 
ganda as advocated by your Eminence, I may 
be permitted to refer to the one of many 
cases, to the decrees of Crusades by the 
Popes Innocent III. and Honoring III. against 
the followers of Vaux and their protector 
Count Raimond of Albigeois and Toulouse — 
to the atrocities committed under and devas- 
tation resulting from these decrees, (1212-1229) 
and to the completion of the conversion of the 
Albigeois by the Roman Catholic Institution 
of the Holy Inquisition. 

And the tendency of the Roman Church to- 
wards using arbitrary power for the suppres- 
sion of ifs antagonists has not left it alto- 
gether. Its expression only is modified. 



— 61 — 

The tendency of conquest by the use of 
sword, fire and rack has modernized in the 
United States of North America into a propa- 
ganda by persuasion for political power and 
for a majority of voters as instrumental to the 
ruling power of the Roman Hierarchy. 

And this propaganda does not exclusively 
take shape in your Eminence's address to the 
people of this republic,but it receives a power- 
ful impulse also from outside by the bold 
outcry of "Independence or Annexation " 
as now openly raised by the Roman Catholic 
press of the Province of Ottawa, always ready 
to carry out its instructions received from the 
Hierarchy. And the flag thus raised has the 
evident object to bring about an increase 
of the Roman Catholic voting power 
within the United States of North America. 
The Roman Church thus seems to be preparing 
for its conquest of these United States, by 
more refined methods than those applied 
under Louis VIII. and Louis IX. in France or 
under Spanish and Roman rule on the South 
American Continent in former centuries. 

If the means applicable under altered cir- 
cumstances have turned out to be u persuasion" 
almost exclusively, it is certainly great pro- 
gress of humanity, that ''persuasion" no longer 
takes such shape, as it took in the case of 
Galileo, and would have taken with Coperni- 
cus and Kepler had they been within Roman 



— 02 — 

jurisdiction. And it is on the other hand an 
honor to the church, that as in the case of 
Cardinal Hohenzoller at Galileo's time, so at 
all times there have been prominent men in the 
fold of the church free of zealotic fanatism. 

But to persuasion there are as yet sundry 
modifications. So your Eminence attempts to 
persuade the North American people, that free 
thinkers and r agnostics are no better, than 
ancient pagans were, a position being true to 
the general tendency of the Roman Church. 

In fact the Church takes towards h ere tics (and 
now towards agnostics) the same unjustified po- 
sition as taken by the pagan Tacitus (your Em- 
inence on page 262) took towards Christianity 
calling it "a detestable superstition provoking 
the just hatred of humanity?'' And the same 
consequences are the result now as they were 
then namely: persecution on the one hand and 
martyrdom and propagation jointly on the 
other. 

And then as now the persecutors (p. 262) 
do not think it worth while to inquire into 
the charges, which prejudice and hate had 
invented against an inoffensive peopled 

And at the present age (p. 262) "The 
conservative element in society opposes be- 
cause it {agnosticism) is new, and because the 
{old) worship had the authority of venerable 
antiquity. This is the religion, which they 
and their fathers had followed for genera- 
tions, and they can not calmly suffer this new 
sort to disturb the old order of tilings."' 



— 63 — 

Your Eminenc • states (on p. 9) as follows : 
Wliile these pages are passing through the 
press, we are informed by the daily papers, 
that an anti- Christian Sunday -school has 
been opened in a public hall in Baltimore, 
and that weekly sessions are regularly held 
there. We learn from the same source, that 
some Protestant clergymen of our city have 
urged the Mayor to suppress this infidel 
school. Waiving the question of right 

WHICH THE CIVIL AUTHORITIES MAY HAVE TO 
INTERFERE IN MATTERS OF THIS KIND, I do 

not believe, that any radical cure of this 
religious distemper can be effected by repress- 
ive measures. It is not by coercion, but by 
the voluntary surrender of the citadel of the 
heart, that man is converted. Coercion only 
drives the poison into the social body, where it 
secretly ferments. Our divine Saviour never 
invoiced the sword to vindicate His doctrines. 
He rebuked> his disciple, when he once drew 
the sword in defense of His Master, and com- 
manded him to put it back into its scabbard. 
' i The weapons of our warfare, ' ' says the Apos- 
tle, ''are not carnal," but spiritual; they are 
the weapo?is of argument, of persuasion and 
charity. The only sword I would draw 
against the children of unbelief, is "tJie 
sword of the Spirit, which is the word of 
Ood; ' ' and the only fire I loould light against 
them,) is the fire of divine love,which our Lord 



— 64 — 

came to enkindle in the hearts of men. In a 
word, I would convince them, that Christian- 
ity "is profitable for all things, having the 
promise of the life that now is," as toell as 
"of that which is to come" 

Your Eminence thus yields to circumstances 
only. If the Roman Church possessed as yet 
political influence or power enough for repres- 
sive measures, the Roman Catholic conscience 
would forbid to your Eminence to waive the 
question of right to interfere in matters of 
the teaching of heresy in the United States. 
Your Eminence could not well contradict this 
assumption, because it rests on the preced- 
ents and ecclesiastical practices, as demon- 
strated for centuries and on the teachings 
of the Roman Church as such. 

That Jesus of Nazareth forbade to his disci- 
ple to use brutal power,has absolutely no value 
for demonstrating, that the Roman Church did 
or would do the same. The practices of the 
Churchin this matter as in many others have 
for many years not been the practice of Christ. 
To deny this, because the Catholic Sovereigns 
and the Church were two, would be subterfuge 
only. Had Christ ever assumed the exterior and 
appearance of a prince,as your Eminence does; 
the judgment of Pontius Pilatus would have 
been a just one instead of an unjust one, such 



— 65 — 

as the story goes. What in the teaching of 
Christ justifies the Roman Pontifex in claim- 
ing, that he cannot (non possumus) relinquish 
temporal power and possession without betray- 
ing his mission as the high priest of the Church 
of Christ? 

There are many good reasons to believe, that 
were Jesus of Nazareth to reappear on the 
earth at the present moment, he would not 
find it in accordance with his own teachings 
and prescriptions to belong to the Roman 
Catholic Church and much less to live as a 
prelate of the church does. 

To compare Christianity of later centuries 
with Paganism of earlier centuries has no ele- 
ment, by which those living at present can be 
convinced, either that their free thought or 
agnosticism sets them back into paganism, 
nor that the Christian practices of the present 
day are any better, than those of free thinkers 
would be, did they have the temporal 
means, as the church has, to practice with, or 
were they sufficiently bent in this direction 
and sufficiently numerous to collect the same 
worldly wealth as the Roman Church does. 

It is traditional with the Roman Church to 
apply all what its prominent defenders against 
paganism once said against pagans, also to 
modern searchers for facts and truths. But 



— 66 — 

the practice nevertheless is not a good one, 
because nothing can thus be rationally 
proven. 

Before leaving the allusions of your Emi- 
nence's book I beg leave to state, that the 
question as to who, the pagan or the christian 
human individual, enjoyed the greater happi- 
ness in quantity and quality, has been many 
times discussed and differently answered, but 
whichever way the decision may fall, it is ir- 
relevant as to the questions under considera- 
tion, other social conditions relating to the 
same questions. 

Under equal surrounding conditions it would 
appear probable, that as against the one, whose 
conscience is continuously troubled by doubt- 
ing what he holds himself in duty bound to be- 
lieve, the other one, whose convictions, con- 
science and duties are in peace and harmony, 
is more apt to feel happy than the former. 

One of the reasons, why the Roman Cath- 
olic Church be eligible to a higher de- 
gree than other religious creeds, your Emi- 
nence has claimed to be the Roman 
Church's anti-slavery championship. 

What an enormous error is it to attribute 
the melting away of human slavery to the 
effulgent rays of the gospel, if under gospel 
the teachings of the Roman Catholic clergy 
are meant. 



— 67 — 

Has there ever been such a thing heard of, 
as a conflict between the Roman Church and 
the Southern slaveholders 'i 

The Roman clergy confined itself in this 
case, as it had in all others, to admonish the 
slave owner to charity and the slave to patient 
endurance, but the institution as such was 
not known to be contrary to the doctrine 
and effulgent rays of the lights of the Roman 
Church. A Baltimore or New Orleans arch- 
bishop of ante-civil war times would have very 
much hesitated before preaching the melting 
away of slavery. 

In 1839 for the first time, and only when 
Protestant England was practically suppress- 
ing slavery, Pope Gregory XVI. enlisted the 
church in the same endeavor. 

Thus the Roman Church modified her me- 
thods of propagation of faith from the applica- 
tion of brutal power to incrimination of her 
adversaries and again to sundry varieties of 
persuasion. One of the later phases shown is 
your Eminence's fictitious proposition to meet 
agnostics on their own ground of proof by in- 
tellectual labor. The proposition to persuade 
the intellectually untrained being the latest 
phase of Roman propaganda would be an 
advantageous move, if it w 7 ere to pass un- 
heeded and without protest, and this republic 
might one day awaken, were the move to be 
successful, to the fact, that it be under the 



— 68 — 

authority and rule of the Roman Pontifex, 
who then without any doubt would supercede 
your Eminence or your Eminence's successor 
as the head of the Roman Hierarchy of the 
United States of North America and would 
find all the church's boldest visions as to tem- 
poral power realized by the influence his 
Holiness would then exercise on our political 
powers, and might even find it opportune to 
be elected President of the United States 
through a majority of Roman Catholic voters, 
thus restoring the so-much coveted temporal 
power on this continent, it having proven im- 
possible to restore it in modern Rome. 

My next letter will more specifically consider 
the eventual practical results of the Roman 
Church propagating in the United States dur- 
ing the coming century at the same rate as it 
has during the past century. 



SIXTH LETTER. 

The Roman Catholic Church is a Serious 

Danger in Itself to the Institutions 

of the United States of 

North America. 

Your Eminence 

When all the facts be considered, as they ex- 
ist, it will appear, that the teachings and the 
practices of the Roman Catholic Church are 
absolutely and totally incompatible with, the 
free institutions of this republic, and that the 
Roman Catholic Church as such is in revolt 
against these institutions, and is by its verj T 
nature and tendencies bound to destroy the 

a/ 

free institutions of this republic as speedily, as 
it will control a majority of voters. 

With a majority of voters adhering to Pro- 
testantism the North American people would 
continue to enjoy home rule and the fruits of 
the great reform movements in the 16th and 
17th centuries and of the 30 years war, while 
under a majority of catholics exercising sov- 
ereignty in the United States, under the 
authority of a Roman Pontifex, home-rule 
would be as effectively dead, as it was before 
our first American revolution. And so much 
worse yet would foreign rule be, as it would 



— 70 — 

involve not our temporal wealth but the free- 
dom of our consciences and convictions. 

It is this civil and political side of the ques- 
tion, which causes your Eminence's book to be 
considered as a danger to the free institutions 
of the North American people And in conse- 
quence there is sufficient reason, that it should 
not be allowed to pass without a word of warn- 
ing and contradiction, such as those from 
the very reverently undersigned. 

To show, that this be confessedly so on the 
part of those in the fold of the Roman Catho- 
lic Church, their following official declaration 
prepared under the watchful eyes of the 
hierarchy and issued by The first Congress of 
Catholic Laymen in the United States is here set forth : 

" The meeting of the first Congress of Catholic lay- 
men in the United States to celebrate the hundredth 
anniversary of the establishment of the American 
hierarchy is an event of the greatest importance to 
our Church and country. It would seem eminently 
proper that we, the laymen of the Church, should 
meet and renew our allegiance to the doctrine we pro- 
fess; that we should show to our fellow-countrymen 
the true relations that exist between the Church that 
we obey and love and the government of our choice; 
that we should proclaim that unity of sentiment up- 
on all subjects presented to us, which has ever been 
the source of Catholic strength, and that in a spirit 
of perfect charity towards every denomination we 
should freely exchange our views in relation to all 
matters, which effect us as members of the Catholic 
Church. 

"In the first place, then, we rejoice at the mar- 
velous development of our country, and regard with 



— 71 — 

just pride the part taken by Catholics in such develop- 
ment. In the words of the pastoral issued by the 
Archbishops and Bishops of the United States assem- 
bled in the third Plenary Council of Baltimore, 'we 
claim to be acquainted both with the laws, institu- 
tions and spirit of the Catholic Church, and with the 
laws, institutions and spirit of our country, and we 
emphatically declare that there is no antagonism be- 
tween them. 1 

u We repudiate with equal earnestness the asser- 
tion, that we need to lay aside any of our devotedness 
to our Church to be true Americans and the insinua- 
tion, that we need to abate any of our love for our 
country 1 s principles and institutions to be faithful Catho- 
lics. We believe that our country's heroes were the 
instruments of the God of nations in establishing their 
home of freedom. To both the Almighty and to his 
instruments in the work, we look with grateful rev- 
erence, and to maintain the inheritance of freedom 
which they have left us, should it ever — which God 
forbid — be imperiled, our Catholic citizens will be 
found to stand forward as one man, ready to pledge 
anew ' their lives, their fortunes and their sacred 
honor.' 

" We cannot, however, shut our eyes to the many 
dangers that threaten the destruction of the social 
fabric, upon which depend our peace, our liberty and 
our free institutions. Although our wealth has in- 
creased and prosperity abounds, our cities have mul- 
tiplied and our States increased, we find under the 
shadow of this system incipient pauperism, discon- 
tented men, women and children without the benefits 
of education, without advantages of religion, de- 
prived of any share in that abundance or participa- 
tion in the blessings which through our free institu- 
tions God Almighty has designed for the people of 
our land. 
Kemembering the distinction between Pagan and 



— 72 — 

Christian civilization as to the heed to be paid to the 
right of the individual, we favor those means, 
measures and systems by which these blessings are 
to be secured to all alike.* 

"We recognize, next in importance to religion 
itself, education as one of the chief factors in form- 
ing the character of the individual, the virtue of the 
citizen and promoting the advance of a true civiliza- 
tion. Therefore we are committed to a sound popu- 
lar education, which demands not only physical and 
intellectual, but also the moral and religious train- 
ing of our youth. As in the State schools, no provision 
is made for teaching religion, we must continue to sup- 
port our own schools, colleges and universities already 
established, and multiply and perfect others, so that the 
benefits of a Christian education may be brought within 
the reach of every Catholic child within these United 
States. 

"We also recognize among the three great educa- 
tional agencies, besides the church and school, the 
Christian home. i The root of the commonwealth is 
the homes of the people.' Whatever imperils its 
permanency, security and peace is a blow aimed not 
only at individual rights, but it is an attempt to 
subvert civil society and Christian civilization. 

"Therefore we denounce the existence and de- 
velopment of Mormonism and the tendency to mul- 
tiply causes of divorces a vinculo as plague spots on 
our civilization, a discredit to our Government, a 
degradation of the female sex and a standing 
menace to the sanctity of the marriage bond. We 
likewise hold, that it is not sufficient for individual 
Catholics to shun bad or dangerous societies, but 
that they ought to take part in good and useful 
ones. The importance of Catholic societies, and 



* How does this correspond with the Hierachy's posi- 
tion towards the "Anti-Poverty" movement and Rev. 
McGlynn. The AUTHOR, 



— 73 — 

the necessity of union and concert of action to ac- 
complish aught, are manifest. These societies should 
be organized on a religous and not on a race or na- 
tional basis. We must always remember that the 
Catholic Church knows no North or South, no East 
or West, no race, no color. National societies, as 
such, have no place in the Church in this country, hut, 
like this Congress itself, they should be Catholic and 
American." 

"We commend the plan and form of the St. Vin- 
cent de Paul Society as a typical Catholic society. 
It is impossible to enumerate all the societies, whose 
labors have done so much in the past to succor the 
poor and alleviate human misery: and it must there- 
forebe left to individual action to select the field in 
which each shall aid in religious and charitable work. 
As our young men, however, are the hope of the 
future, we especially commend them to the support 
and encouragement of Catholics. As these were com- 
mended in a special manner by the Plenary Council, 
we recommend the establishment of these societies 
throughout the land and urge upon the laity the im- 
portance of supporting them by every means with- 
in their power. We recommend the extension of 
societies designed to assist the widows and children 
of deceased members, societies for the relief of the 
poor and distressed, not forgetting measures tend- 
ing to improve the condition of inmates of our penal 
institutions. 

"Another danger which menaces our republic is 
the constant conflict between capital and labor. 
We, therefore, at all times must view with feelings of 
regret and alarm any antagonism existing between 
them, because thereby society itself is imperiled. 
With the Church, we condemn Mhilism, Socialism 
and Communism, and we equally condemn the 
heartless greed of capital. The remedy must be 
sought in the mediation of the Church through her 



— 74 — 

action on the individual conscience and thereby on 
society, teaching each its respective duties as well 
as rights : and in such civil enactments as have been 
rendered necessary by these altered conditions. As 
stated by His Eminence Cardinal Gibbons, ' labor 
has its sacred rights a& well as its dignity. Para- 
mount among the rights of the laboring classes is 
their privilege to organize or to form themselves 
into societies for their mutual protection and bene- 
fit. In honoring and upholding labor the nation 
is strengthening its own hands as well as paying a 
tribute to worch, 'for a contented and happy work- 
ing class is the best safeguard of the Eepublic.' " 

"We disapprove of the employment of very 
young minors — whether male or female — in factories 
as tending to dwarf and retard the true development 
of the wage-earners of the future. We pledge our- 
selves to co-operate with the clergy in discussing 
and in solving those great economic, educational and 
social questions which effect the interests and well- 
being of the church, the country and society at 
large. " 

" We respectfully protest against any change in the 
policy of the Government in the matter of the educa- 
tion of the Indians, by which they will be deprived 
of Christian teaching. That the amelioration and 
promation of the physical and moral culture of the 
negro race is a subject of the utmost concern, and 
we pledge ourselves to assist our clergy in all ways 
tending to effect any improvement in their condi- 
tion. 

"We are in favor of Catholics taking greater part 
than they have hitherto taken in general philan- 
thropic and reformatory movements. The obliga- 
tion to help the needy and to instruct the ignorant 
is not limited to the needy and ignorant of our own 
communion, but we are concerned, both as Catholics 
and Americans,in the reformation of all the criminals 



— 75 — 

and the support of all the poor in the country. By 
mingling more in such works of National virtue as 
our non-Catholic fellow-citizens are engaged in and 
taking our proper share in the management of pris- 
ons and hospitals we might exert a Catholic influence 
outside of our own body, make ourselves better 
known and infuse into those good works something 
of supernatural charity, and at the same time that 
we are solacing the unfortunate and reforming the 
erring; and we should be able to insist on Catholic 
inmates being freely ministered to by their own 
clergy. We must assert and secure the right of 
conscience of Catholics in all institutions under pub- 
lic control. 

"There are many other Christian issues in which 
Catholics could come together with non- Catholics and 
shape civil legislation for the public weal. In spite 
of rebuff and injustice and overlooking zealotry we 
should seek alliance with non-Catholics for proper 
Sunday observance. Without going over to the Ju- 
daic Sabbath we can bring the masses over to the 
moderation of the Christian Sunday. To effect this 
we must set our faces sternly against the sale of 
intoxicating beverages on Sunday. The corrupting 
influence of saloons in politics, the crime and pauper- 
ism resulting from excessive drinking, require legisla- 
tive restriction which we can aid in procuring by join- 
ing our influence with that of the other enemies of 
intemperance. Let us resolve that drunkenness 
shall be made odious and give practical encourage- 
ment and support to Catholic temperance societies. 
We favor the passage and enforcement of laws rigidly 
closing saloons on Sunday and forbidding the sale of 
liquors to minors and intoxicated persons. 

Efforts should be made to promote Catholic read- 
ing. It is our duty to support liberally good Catho- 
lic journals and books and acquaint ourselves with 
Catholic doctrine and opinion on the important 



— 76 — 

questions constantly coming to the front and demand- 
ing right answers and just practical solutions. 
There are comparatively few Catholics who cannot 
afford the cost of a Catholic journal or who do not 
spend more for a story paper or a novel than the 
price of one. 

u We not only recommend Catholics to subscribe 
more generally for Catholic periodicals, quarterly, 
monthly or weekly, but look with eagerness for the 
establishment of daily Catholic newspapers in our 
large cities and a Catholic associated press agency. 
If our Catholic literature is not equal to the standard 
by which we measure it, this is due, at least in part, 
to the slight encouragement now given to Catholic 
writers of the better type. If the best Catholic 
books were extensively purchased and read, more 
would be written which we should be proud of. We 
recommend,therefore, the work of Catholic circulat- 
ing libraries and reading circles and also efforts to 
have the best Catholic books and periodicals intro- 
duced into public libraries. But we do not call all 
books Catholic that are written by Catholics, nor a 
journal which is Catholic on one page and infidel or 
immoral on another. 

" As fast as practicable we hope for the introduc- 
tion of proper church music in all our churches 
where other music is now heard. The music should 
help devotion at the divine service, and not be such 
as tends to divert the mind from heavenly thoughts. 
Efforts should be made to have the congregation join 
in the singing — a Catholic custom formerly, but 
practised in only a few churches nowadays. 

" We cannot conclude without recording our sol- 
emn conviction that the absolute freedom of the Holy 
See is equally indispensable to the peace of the 
Church and the welfare of mankind. We demand 
in the name of humanity and justice that this free- 
dom be scrupulously respected by all secular govern- 



— 77 — 

merits. We protest against the assumption by any 
such government of a right to affect the interests or 
control the action of our Holy Father by any form of 
legislation or other public act to which his full appro- 
bation has not been previously given, and we pledge 
to Leo XIII., the worthy Pontiff, to whose hands 
Almighty God has committed the helm of Peter's 
bark amid the tempests of this stormy age, the loyal 
sympathy and unstinted aid of all his spiritual child- 
ren in vindicating that perfect liberty which he 
justly claims as his sacred and inalienable right ". 

The foregoing manifesto's main character- 
istic is precisely expressed by the French 
proverb: Qui s 'excuse s' accuse. (He who 
excuses himself involuntarily accuses him- 
self). Would any of the protestant sects find 
it necessary to declare: "That there is no 
antagonism between laws, institutions and 
spirit of the Church on the one hand and of 
this country on the other." 

It does appear to all non-Roman Catholics, 
that such antagonism indeed does exist and 
that the above sweeping assertion is bluntly 
contradicted by other parts of the same man- 
ifesto. The cutting loose and abjuration from 
all dependence and obedience to foreign poten- 
tates is a first condition to citizenship of these 
United States of North America. In contrast 
therewith is contained and prominently ex- 
pressed in the hereabove copied official procla- 
mation of the Catholic Laymen (voters) of the 
United States, the voluntary declaration, that 
these Laymen do obey the church, that they love 



— 78 — 

it, while the government of the United States 
is alluded to as the government of their (prac- 
tical) choice. 

Again while it is declared, that there be no 
antagonism between the laws, institutions 
and spirit of the Catholic Church on the one 
hand and of this country on the other, the 
manifesto declares in contradiction thereto the 
intention to destroy our institution of non- 
sectarian public schools. 

As shown in the beginning of my fifth letter 
a government just to all has indeed no other 
choice but to be unsectarian in all its laws and 
practices. If the government of the United 
States is practically unloyal to this first prin- 
ciple of a just government by giving practical 
preference to protestant clergj^men as against 
those of other confessions, as against ignoring 
them all, then this failing in one point though 
an encouragement for Roman Catholics for 
further infringement on the fundamental prin- 
ciples of our institutions, can form no justifi- 
cation therefore. 

But the difference as between the two is, 
that the infringement on the part of protestant- 
ism is one of petty practice not involving a fun- 
damental principle and being a concession to 
the majority's still existing intellectual bond- 
age under orthodoxism; while Romanism 
advances claims being incompatible with the 
fundamental principles of our government, 



— 79 — 

Be it assumed for a moment, that the Roman 
Catholic Church after a successful propagation 
amongst the busy ones ^having neither inclina- 
tion nor time to consider the question of 
creed, with the thoroughness it evidently de- 
serves, or amongst the very class your Emi- 
nence's address (book) is directed to — should 
have become possessed of a majority of voters 
in the United States. 

Are they not organized for election pur- 
poses more thoroughly than any other polit- 
ical body on this continent? Can there be a 
question as to what practical turn the politi- 
cal action of this organization would take, even 
in case the appearance of independent nomin- 
ations be preserved? Obedience to the Qhurch 
must govern such nominations as often as any 
question relating to the interest of the Church 
be at issue. And the Church will never fail 
to give her order and command, there being 
presumably always a question at issue, in which 
the church as well as the Catholic conscience 
is involved, as for instance the question of 
sectarian or non-sectarian public schools — of 
the temporal possessions and civil sovereignty 
of the pope, the suppression or non-suppress- 
ion by the civil power of educational institu- 
tions founded by freethinkers or agnostics, 
your Eminence waiving the later question ev- 
idently only for the present — the suppression 
in the public press of what to the Roman 



— 80 — 

Clmrcli is "blasphemy" only, but which in 
reality is the scientific discussion only of 
topics, in which humanity at large is deeply, 
intensly interested, and about which it has a 
full natural right to be informed and disa- 
bused — the educating of Indian tribes so as to 
become proselytes of the Roman Church and 
in consequence Roman voting citizens. 

An invasion and conquest of Canada pre- 
tendedly in the interest of freedom but really 
for the purpose of increasing the Roman 
Catholic voting power would under the rule 
of a Roman Catholic majority of voters and 
of their elected representatives with the obe- 
dience of all to the Roman Pontifex be with- 
in probability. 

Were the sovereign people of the United 
States, electing the instruments of both the 
legislative and executive pow r er, to become a 
people of Roman Catholics,all our institutions 
would soon be shaped in accordance with the 
spirit of the Roman Church. And what has 
this spirit proven to be? 

The recent declaration of the dogimt of the 
infallibility of the Roman Pontifex when 
speaking ex cathedra (officially)creates the ap- 
pearance of a tendency toward absolutism. At 
all events all power in the government of the 
church has been taken away from the people 
at large, and its hands, although they are ex- 
pected to be open at all times for largely con- 



- 81 — 

tributing to the needs of the Church and of 
the clergy, are thoroughly manacled by the 
church law, that all property intended for 
religious or parish purposes cannot be 
held by the single communities themselves, 
but must be transferred to the hierarchical 
organization, before any priest of the Church 
may there officiate. Laymen have no longer 
the power of electing the priest officia- 
ting to their religious requirements, the elect- 
ion of teachers in their schools is under the 
dictation and approval of priestdom, and pref- 
erence is given to men and women, the intellect 
of whom has been warped to the effect, that 
they believe exclusion from contact with the 
world will befit them better for preparing our 
children for their travel on the high road of 
busy life, and whose vow of celibacy and ex- 
clusion from legitimate intercourse with the 
other sex constitutes them as a permanent 
danger to public morals. 

Therefore there can be no reasonable doubt, 
but that any legislative assembly with a ma- 
jority of Catholic members, obeying to the 
commands of the Roman Church, as given 
by her acknowledged infallible represen- 
tative, the Roman pope,— would destroy the 
institution of non-sectarian public schools, 
would spend the public moneys for the; sup- 
port of Roman Catholic schools, would be pre- 
vented in their consciences from appropriating 



- 82 - 

moneys to the use of schools of heretics. 

And the Catholic executive power of the 
United States would be in conscience held to 
propagate the influence and power of the 
Roman Church in our political institutions by 
absorbing preferably catholic Canada, Mex- 
ico and Cuba, to aid in the re-establishment of 
the temporal power of the Roman pontifex, 
though such action might involve the United 
States in war, with half of the European 
powers. All At Majorem Dei Gloriam, 
though our freedom of conscience and our 
equality before the law and in the exercise of 
oar political rights should be destroyed, and 
unless a new,more bitter, more bloody war for 
freedom of conscience be fought once more, 
than the history of the human race has seen 
before. 



SEVENTH LETTER. 

What Creed the American Citizen 
Should Select. 

Your Eminence : 

That coming generations should also enjoy 
the boon and glory of the free institutions of 
this great republic, to the shores of which mil- 
lions have fled from oppression, hoping to find 
freedom of conscience and individual liberty 
in matters of conviction and belief, this all de- 
pends on the Roman Catholic Church never 
obtaining a majority of votes in the Republic. 

With the acquirements in knowledge and 
science at the present time we stand in a posi- 
tion, where, if we desire to select and accept 
any creed by our free volition and inclination 
and without compulsion and with the full 
knowledge, that true religiosity be monopo- 
lized by no creed on the one hand and be con- 
ditional to none on the other, it is proper, that 
in such selection, we should as citizens of this 
nation, consider besides the probable result of 
such selection on the welfare of ourselves in- 
dividually, the result also, as far as the nation 
at large be concerned. 

In the preceding letter I have shown the 
probable result of a majority of voters of the 



— 84 — 

United States of North America becoming 
Roman Catholics. But personal, individual 
reasons point in the same direction concerning 
the selection of the community we should join 
if any.. 

It cannot be contributive to happiness to be- 
long to a church, which will refuse to bury 
the children at the side of their parents, un- 
less to the last of their breathing they have con- 
fessed to the creed and to the practices of the 
Church, have loved not what the Church hates, 
a church, which carries into modern times all the 
barbarian instincts of intolerance, as they have 
marked its history from the very time, it 
ceased to be itself oppressed and to strive for 
liberty of conscience, and when it developed 
into a power and an oppressor itself. 

If we select to join a religious community, 
it will be better to join one, where as little as 
possible of dogma, and as much as possible 
of mutual charity be preached, and to shun 
a community, where our children's brains will 
be stuffed from the first teachings they listen 
to, with horrible pictures of purgatory, and 
temporal tormentation in after life, which 
may be bought off with money on the part of 
those being left behind to be bestowed on the 
direct worldly benefit of its priestdom, and 
of eternal tormentation, as the result of not 
accepting all the teachings, as the Roman 
Church upholds them, and from time to time 



— 85 — 

expounds them, such as the dogma of Mary, 
both conceiving as a virgin being in turn con- 
ceived herself immaculately, that is in some 
different way from the manner, in which all 
other human beings are conceived, all the 
rest of humanity being assumed to be endowed 
from their very conception not only with all 
the discrepancies and weaknesses of human 
nature but besides with a kind of supernat- 
ural inheritance of a sin committed by Adam 
and Eve, when they, as the story is told by the 
author of the book "Genesis," ate the fruit 
from the tree of knowledge, which we are told 
was then already forbidden, as priestdomisapt 
to forbid it to-day, except when taken for the 
purpose of befitting to the acceptance of their 
teachings, and by which fruit, although Adam 
did not die the very day he ate it, as he had 
been specifically told, that he would die, his 
eyes were opened, and it certainly is our fault 
if at this late date we do not judge with 
•^opened eyes. 

The sole fact, that it is a practice of the Ro- 
man Catholic church, to have the wives and 
daughters of Catholic citizens, enter the con- 
fessional of a man, though he be a clergyman, 
and thereto have them lay open and have dis- 
cussed the secrets of their hearts and bodies, 
should deter every true American man, bearing 
respect to the women of his race, from joining 
the Roman Catholic Church, not to speak of 



— 86 — 

the presumption as between man and man> 
that it requires the instrumentality of one> 
to bring about divine forgiveness for another. 
Americans as a rule are too proud and too 
busy to find time for confessing their sins into 
the ears of another man. 

Your Eminence not having made good the 
assertion (p. 10) concerning us, that Christian- 
ity \ in special in its Roman Catholic form, be 
profitable for all things, having the promise 
of the life, that now is as well as of that, 
lohich is to come, many (including the rever- 
ently undersigned) will respectfully decline 
being drawn into the folds of the Roman 
Church. 

Very Respectfully 

Mich. De Gavarelle. 



- 81 - 

All correspondence must be enveloped twice: 
1st (inner) with the mark I I 

2d (outer) with direction to " Polytechnical News Company," 

New York (7 Pearl Street). 

PROPAGANDA 
VERITATIS NATURALIS. 

Society for Propagating Natural Truth. 
CONSTITUTION. 

1. The Propaganda Veritatis Naturalis is intended to spread 
all over the earth and therefore named in a language used by all na- 
tions. She has associated for the purpose of propagating knowledge 
about natural things as a safeguard against superstition and 
against the false claims of teachers of supernatural theorems. 

2. This purpose is to be promoted by seven methods namely: 

a. Personal attendance to local meetings of members of both sexes 
of the association 

b. The establishment and use of libraries under the control of 
the P. V. N. containing preferably such literature, by which 
the intents of the Propaganda V. N. will be fostered. 

c. The establishment of abodes for Propagandists to meet in, 
their libraries to be kept in, and the people to be admitted in, to 
hear natural truth expounded. 

d. The publication of a series of books and periodicals to show 
and explain the position assumed by the P. V. N. and to propagate 
such knowledge as will foster the tendencies of the Propaganda 

e. The mutual promotion of the temporal welfare of and by all 
members of the Propaganda V. N. by giving to them at least 
legitimate preference under equal conditions in all cases involving 
the interest of members. 

f. The maintenance of special voluntary associations with condi- 
tions equal to all and on an elective basis for securing work to the 
industrious, information to the intellect, care to the sick or 
poor, and honorable burial to the dead. 

g. The support by members of the P. V. N. within their own polit- 
ical party of members of theP.V. N. in all nominations and elec- 
tions for public offices. 



— 88 — 

3. The Propaganda V. N. is both national and international 
Her organization is that of a people rul ltself by c ™ ^ 

election its authority to its own temporary agents for S "five 

EX? Tl T CUUVe PUrp ° SeS ' her Constitution being simL; 
to that of the United States with unimpeached autonomy ™ all 

^L y^Tl tD h6r or S anlzation . the different orderT having 

^rtnfornL1ron gthememberS *** ~ y funeJonf 

Her Roots are the National Associations, (National Chants 
each with Autonomy of Organization, parted one from another 
by their idioms, each including seven orders (1 to 7) an °ther 

ter^^Chap^'of ^^or^Srer iST*** < In " 
and the executive authority, £l£?g% ^T *~* 

Her Branches are the Interna tirmoi w~ i 
National Chapters, chosen by Z ac S^to aSL££? *T 
ing from the Great Grand Master, Maftersof ST^TrZ T" 
They include orders 11 and 12 of the Mission^ r^f Chapters, 
missionaries acting in their own banter L? Pr '°". e ° rder ° f 
as envoys to other chapters. ° P *^ and ° ne or<1 ^ acting 

5. The Propaganda Veritatis Naturalis has members »h„ 
enter as such of the first order, and may, by virtue of h„M.' 
elective office in the order or by election' alnS^er^Ss Z 
by appointment through either the National or Internatfona l\l 
ecutive Power be advanced from order to order 11Uernatlonal Ex " 
C. The twelve orders of the Propaganda Veritatis Naturalis are 
f J. Order of Readers, 
i- ' Thinkers 



Speakers. (Local Expounders) 

National Chapters £ . ^rfVocal Officers,. 

" - I»^ Xsr cers)or 

. Gra cL P ?er er 0t NationaI 

r > Q - Legislators ( Congress ) Ex 

International f Pha^El Masiers of National 

Chapter j 9 . « ^^ ^^ 

i oSrSsss&asKs' 



— 89 — 

r 11. Order of Permanent Commisioners re- 
presenting the International 
Great Grand Master in each 
Missionary national Chapter (Ex-Great 

J Grand Masters and Ex- 

Chapter Grand Masters) 

12. " Envoys extraordinary from 
the International Great 
( Grand Master to National 

Chapters. 

7. The Propaganda uses (international) signs of recognition 
each order adding one to those of the lower orders. 

8. Only at official gatherings of the Propaganda V. N. members 
are u der obligation to respond to calls for recognition. 

Willingness to respond to all calls for recognition by members 
of the Propaganda V. N., is expressed by the wearing of the Pro- 
paganda V. N.'s Emblem. 

10. Readership (First Order) is acquired by the purchase of 
six of its serial publications, evidenced by the return of blanks 
taken from the copies purchased, and involves no obligations but 
entitles to admission to the second order (of thinkers) without 
other formalities than the registration in the secret lists of the 
Propaganda V. N. as members of the second orders 

11. Applicants to the second order are entitled to be informed of 
the By-Laws of the Propaganda before entering the same and of the 
signs and emblems of their order and of the symbols, with which 
the officers of their order sign. 

12. The mark: "Published by order of the Society for Propa- 
gating Natural Truth", or other words of the same or similar 
meaning can be attached to any book or periodical only under a 
written authority from the "Secretary for Publications of the Society 
for Propagating Natural Truth.'' 1 And this authority is given 
only under a special order from the National Grand Master, who 
shall previously hear the workers, and such order is not made, 
unless the book or periodical be printed on the P. V. N.'s own 
presses or be issued under contract, by which the P. V. N. receives 
a share in the proceeds towards her administrative expenses. 
The Propaganda V. N. does not assume by such mark responsi 
bility for all contents but signifies the approval of the general 
tendency of the publication only. 



Printed by resolution of the Senate and by order of the 
National Grand Master of the chapter of the U. S. N. A., and by 
order of the Great-Grand Master of the Propaganda V. N. 
The Secretary for Publications of the 

Society for Propagating Natural Truth. 



a 



— 91 — 

To the Secretary for Publications of the 
Society for Propagating Natural Truth. 
To be mailed with inner envelop marked 
□ and outer envelop directed to: 
"The Poly technical News Company" , 
7 Pearl Street, {near Battery Park), 

New York 

confidential. 
Sir: 

The undersigned having purchased and 
read No. 1 of the Series of Publications of the 
Society for Propagating Natural Truth, 
and being in sympathy with the tendencies 
therein expressed, as far as essential ques- 
tions are concerned, desires to join the above 
named Society and toco-operate with it in the 
propagation of natural truth as distinct 
from supernatural theorems. The under- 
signed also signifies his (her) desire to receive 
(under cover) the next . . . publications 
of the same series limiting the shipment to 
. . . numbers per month. 
Date, Direction. Signature. 



The undersigned desires to receive under 
cover by mail the 2nd and following 4 issues of 

NATURE. 

The Agnostic* s Magazine. 

. . . more copies of the first issue. 

Agreeing to pay 50 cents for each copy 
(same size as the first issue) when the same 
has been received. 

Date Direction Signature 



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